HE  CUTTING 
^FAN^GATE 

By   W.    B.    YEATS  ! 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

RIVERSIDE 


THE  CUTTING  OF  AN  AGATE 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

VBW  YORK  •    BOSTON   •    CHICAGO 
DALLAS   •    SAN   FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limited 

LONDON   •    BOMBAY   ■    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


THE    CUTTING 
OF  AN   AGATE 


BY 
WILLIAM   BUTLER  YEATS 

AUTHOR  OF  "ideas  OF  GOOD  AND 
EVIL,"  ETC. 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 
1912 

AU  rights  reserved 


COPTBISHT,  1912, 

By  the  macmillan  company. 

Set    up    and    electrotyped.  Published  November,  1912. 


PREFACE 

When  I  wrote  the  essay  on  Edmund  Spen- 
ser the  company  of  Irish  players  who  have 
now  their  stage  at  the  Abbey  Theatre  in 
Dublin  had  been  founded,  but  gave  as  yet 
few  performances  in  a  twelvemonth.  I 
could  let  my  thought  stray  where  it  would, 
and  even  give  a  couple  of  summers  to  The 
Faerie  Queene;  while  for  some  ten  years 
now  I  have  written  little  verse  and  no  prose 
that  did  not  arise  out  of  some  need  of  those 
players  or  some  thought  suggested  by  their 
work,  or  was  written  in  the  defence  of  some 
friend  whose  life  has  been  a  part  of  the 
movement  of  events  which  is  creating  a  new 
Ireland  unintelligible  to  an  old  Ireland  that 
watches  with  anger  or  indifference.  The  de- 
tailed defence  of  plays  and  players,  published 
originally  in  Samhain,  the  occasional  peri- 
odical of  the  theatre,  and  now  making  some 
three  hundred  pages  of  Mr.  Bullen's  col- 
lected edition  of  my  writings,  is  not  here, 


vi  PREFACE 

but  for  the  most  part  an  exposition  of 
principles,  wlietlier  suggested  by  my  own 
work  or  by  the  death  of  friend  or  fellow- 
worker,  that,  intended  for  no  great  public,  has 
been  printed  and  published  from  a  Hand 
Press  which  my  sisters  manage  at  Dundrum 
with  the  help  of  the  village  girls.  I  have 
been  busy  with  a  single  art,  that  of  the  thea- 
tre, of  a  small,  unpopular  theatre ;  and  this 
art  may  well  seem  to  practical  men,  busy  with 
some  programme  of  industrial  or  political 
regeneration,  of  no  more  account  than  the 
shaping  of  an  agate ;  and  yet  in  the  shaping 
of  an  agate,  whether  in  the  cutting  or  the  mak- 
ing of  the  design,  one  discovers,  if  one  have  a 
speculative  mind,  thoughts  that  seem  impor- 
tant and  principles  that  may  be  applied  to 
life  itself,  and  certainly  if  one  does  not  be- 
lieve so,  one  is  but  a  poor  cutter  of  so  hard  a 

stone. 

W.  B.  YEATS. 

August,  1912. 


CONTENTS 

PAOB 

Thoughts  on  Lady  Gregory's  Translations 

I.   Cuchulain  and  his  Cycle        ...  1 

II.    Fion  and  his  Cycle         ....  12 

Preface  to  the  First  Edition  op  the  Well 

OF  THE  Saints 86 

Discoveries 

Prophet,  Priest  and  King      .        .        .        .49 

Personality  and  the  Intellectual  Essences     .  56 

The  Musician  and  the  Orator       ...  61 

A  Guitar  Player 63 

The  Looking-glass 65 

The  Tree  of  Life 67 

The  Praise  of  Old  Wives'  Tales   ...  71 

The  Play  of  Modern  Manners       ...  73 
Has  the  Drama  of   Contemporary  Life  a 

Root  of  its  Own  ?       .        .        .        .        .76 
Why  the  Blind  Man  in  Ancient  Times  was 

made  a  Poet 79 

Concerning  Saints  and  Artists      ...  85 

The  Subject  Matter  of  Drama      ...  89 

The  Two  Kinds  of  Asceticism      ...  94 
vii 


viii  CONTENTS 

FAGS 

In  the  Serpent's  Mouth         ....  97 

The  Black  and  the  White  Arrows        .        .  99 

His  Mistress's  Eyebrows        ....  100 
The  Tresses  of  the  Hair        .        .        .        .103 

A  Tower  on  the  Apennines  ....  104 
The  Thinking  of  the  Body   .        .        .        .106 

Religious  Belief  Necessary  to  Religious  Art  109 

The  Holy  Places 113 

poetky  and  tradition 116 

Preface  to  the  First  Edition  of  John  M. 

Synge's  Poems  and  Translations      .  139 

J.  M.  Synge  and  the  Ireland  of  his  Time  146 

The  Tragic  Theatre 196 

John  Shawe-Taylor 208 

Edmund  Spenser 213 


THE  CUTTING  OF  AN  AGATE 


THE  CUTTING  OF  AN  AGATE 

THOUGHTS  ON  LADY   GREGORY'S 
TRANSLATIONS 

I 

CUCHULAIN  AND   HIS   CYCLE 

The  Church  when  it  was  most  powerful 
taught  learned  and  unlearned  to  climb,  as 
it  were,  to  the  great  moral  realities  through 
hierarchies  of  Cherubim  and  Seraphim, 
through  clouds  of  Saints  and  Angels  who 
had  all  their  precise  duties  and  privileges. 
The  story-tellers  of  Ireland,  perhaps  of 
every  primitive  country,  imagined  as  fine 
a  fellowship,  only  it  was  to  the  aesthetic 
realities  they  would  have  had  us  climb. 
They  created  for  learned  and  unlearned 
alike,  a  communion  of  heroes,  a  cloud  of 
stalwart  witnesses ;  but  because  they  were 
as  much  excited  as  a  monk  over  his  prayers, 
B  1 


2        LADY  GREGORY'S   TRANSLATIONS 

they  did  not  think  sufficiently  about  the 
shape  of  the  poem  and  the  story.  We 
have  to  get  a  httle  weary  or  a  Httle  dis- 
trustful of  our  subject,  perhaps,  before 
we  can  lie  awake  thinking  how  to  make 
the  most  of  it.  They  were  more  anxious 
to  describe  energetic  characters,  and  to 
invent  beautiful  stories,  than  to  express 
themselves  with  perfect  dramatic  logic 
or  in  perfectly-ordered  words.  They 
shared  their  characters  and  their  stories, 
their  very  images,  with  one  another,  and 
handed  them  down  from  generation  to 
generation ;  for  nobody,  even  when  he 
had  added  some  new  trait,  or  some  new 
incident,  thought  of  claiming  for  himself 
what  so  obviously  lived  its  own  merry  or 
mournful  life.  The  maker  of  images  or 
worker  in  mosaic  who  first  put  Christ  upon 
a  cross  would  have  as  soon  claimed  as  his 
own  a  thought  which  was  perhaps  put 
into  his  mind  by  Christ  himself.  The 
Irish  poets  had  also,  it  may  be,  what 
seemed  a  supernatural  sanction,  for  a 
chief  poet  had  to  understand  not  only 
innumerable  kinds  of  poetry,  but  how  to 


LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS        3 

keep  himself  for  nine  days  in  a  trance. 
Surely  they  believed  or  half  believed  in 
the  historical  reality  of  even  their  wildest 
imaginations.  And  so  soon  as  Christian- 
ity made  their  hearers  desire  a  chronology 
that  would  run  side  by  side  with  that  of 
the  Bible,  they  delighted  in  arranging  their 
Kings  and  Queens,  the  shadows  of  for- 
gotten mythologies,  in  long  hues  that 
ascended  to  Adam  and  his  Garden.  Those 
who  listened  to  them  must  have  felt  as  if 
the  living  were  like  rabbits  digging  their 
burrows  under  walls  that  had  been  built 
by  Gods  and  Giants,  or  like  swallows 
building  their  nests  in  the  stone  mouths 
of  immense  images,  carved  by  nobody 
knows  who.  It  is  no  wonder  that  one 
sometimes  hears  about  men  who  saw  in  a 
vision  ivy-leaves  that  were  greater  than 
shields,  and  blackbirds  whose  thighs  were 
like  the  thighs  of  oxen.  The  fruit  of  all 
those  stories,  unless  indeed  the  finest  ac- 
tivities of  the  mind  are  but  a  pastime,  is 
the  quick  intelligence,  the  abundant  imag- 
ination, the  courtly  manners  of  the  Irish 
country-people. 


4        LADY  GREGORY'S   TRANSLATIONS 

William  Morris  came  to  Dublin  when 
I  was  a  boy,  and  I  had  some  talk  with  him 
about  these  old  stories.  He  had  intended 
to  lecture  upon  them,  but  'the  ladies  and 
gentlemen '  —  he  put  a  communistic  fer- 
vour of  hatred  into  the  phrase  —  knew 
nothing  about  them.  He  spoke  of  the 
Irish  account  of  the  battle  of  Clontarf  and 
of  the  Norse  account,  and  said,  that  one 
saw  the  Norse  and  Irish  tempers  in  the  two 
accounts.  The  Norseman  was  interested 
in  the  way  things  are  done,  but  the  Irish- 
man turned  aside,  evidently  well  pleased 
to  be  out  of  so  dull  a  business,  to  describe 
beautiful  supernatural  ^  events.  He  was 
thinking,  I  suppose,  of  the  young  man  who 
came  from  Aoibhill  of  the  Grey  Rock, 
giving  up  immortal  love  and  youth,  that 
he  might  fight  and  die  by  Murrough's 
side.  He  said  that  the  Norseman  had  the 
dramatic  temper,  and  the  Irishman  had 
the  lyrical.  I  think  I  should  have  said 
with  Professor  Ker,  epical  and  romantic 
rather  than  dramatic  and  lyrical,  but  his 
words,  which  have  so  great  an  authority, 
mark  the  distinction  very  well,  and  not 


LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS        5 

only  between  Irish  and  Norse,  but  be- 
tween Irish  and  other  un-Celtic  Hteratures. 
The  Irish  story-teller  could  not  interest 
himself  with  an  unbroken  interest  in  the 
way  men  like  himself  burned  a  house,  or 
won  wives  no  more  wonderful  than  them- 
selves. His  mind  constantly  escaped  out 
of  daily  circumstance,  as  a  bough  that  has 
been  held  down  by  a  weak  hand  suddenly 
straightens  itself  out.  His  imagination 
was  always  running  to  Tir-nan-og,  to  the 
Land  of  Promise,  which  is  as  near  to  the 
country-people  of  to-day  as  it  was  to 
Cuchulain  and  his  companions.  His  be- 
lief in  its  nearness,  cherished  in  its  turn 
the  lyrical  temper,  which  is  always  athirst 
for  an  emotion,  a  beauty  which  cannot  be 
found  in  its  perfection  upon  earth,  or  only 
for  a  moment.  His  imagination,  which 
had  not  been  able  to  believe  in  Cuchulain's 
greatness,  until  it  had  brought  the  Great 
Queen,  the  red-eyebrowed  goddess,  to  woo 
him  upon  the  battlefield,  could  not  be 
satisfied  with  a  friendship  less  romantic 
and  lyrical  than  that  of  Cuchulain  and 
Ferdiad,  who  kissed  one  another  after  the 


6        LADY  GBEGOBY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

day's  fighting,  or  with  a  love  less  romantic 
and  lyrical  than  that  of  Baile  and  Aillinn, 
who  died  at  the  report  of  one  another's 
deaths,  and  married  in  Tir-nan-og.     His 
art,  too,  is  often  at  its  greatest  when  it  is 
most  extravagant,  for  he  only  feels  himself 
among  solid  things,  among  things  with  fixed 
laws  and  satisfjdng  pm-poses,  when  he  has 
reshaped  the  world  according  to  his  heart's 
desire.     He  understands  as  well  as  Blake 
that  the  ruins  of  time  build  mansions  in 
eternity,  and  he  never  allows   anything, 
that  we  can  see  and  handle,  to  remain 
long    unchanged.    The    characters    must 
remain  the  same,  but  the  strength  of  Fer- 
gus may  change  so  greatly,  that  he,  who  a 
moment  before  was  merely  a  strong  man 
among  many,  becomes  the  master  of  Three 
Blows  that  would  destroy  an  army,  did 
they  not  cut  off  the  heads  of  three  little 
hills  instead,  and  his  sword,  which  a  fool 
had  been  able  to  steal  out  of  its  sheath, 
has  of  a  sudden  the  likeness  of  a  rainbow. 
A  wandering  lyric  moon  must  knead  and 
kindle  perpetually  that  moving  world  of 
cloaks  made  out  of  the  fleeces  of  Mananan ; 


LADT  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS        7 

of  armed  men  who  change  themselves  into 
sea-birds ;  of  goddesses  who  become  crows ; 
of  trees  that  bear  fruit  and  flower  at  the 
same  time.  The  great  emotions  of  love, 
terror  and  friendship  must  alone  remain 
untroubled  by  the  moon  in  that  world 
which  is  still  the  world  of  the  Irish  country- 
people,  who  do  not  open  their  eyes  very 
wide  at  the  most  miraculous  change,  at 
the  most  sudden  enchantment.  Its  events, 
and  things,  and  people  are  wild,  and  are 
like  unbroken  horses,  that  are  so  much 
more  beautiful  than  horses  that  have 
learned  to  run  between  shafts.  One 
thinks  of  actual  life,  when  one  reads  those 
Norse  stories,  which  had  shadows  of  their 
decadence,  so  necessary  were  the  propor- 
tions of  actual  life  to  their  efforts,  when 
a  dying  man  remembered  his  heroism 
enough  to  look  down  at  his  wound  and  say, 
'Those  broad  spears  are  coming  into  fash- 
ion ' ;  but  the  Irish  stories  make  us  under- 
stand why  some  Greek  writer  called  myths 
the  activities  of  the  daemons.  The  great 
virtues,  the  great  joys,  the  great  privations, 
come  in  the  myths,  and,  as  it  were,  take 


8        LADY  GBEGOBY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

mankind  between  their  naked  arms,  and 
without  putting  off  their  divinity.  Poets 
have  chosen  their  themes  more  often  from 
stories  that  are  all,  or  half,  mythological, 
than  from  history  or  stories  that  give  one 
the  sensation  of  history,  understanding,  as 
I  think,  that  the  imagination  which  remem- 
bers the  proportions  of  Ufe  is  but  a  long 
wooing,  and  that  it  has  to  forget  them  before 
it  becomes  the  torch  and  the  marriage-bed. 
One  finds,  as  one  expects,  in  the  work 
of  men  who  were  not  troubled  about  any 
probabilities  or  necessities  but  those  of 
emotion  itself,  an  immense  variety  of  inci- 
dent and  character  and  of  ways  of  express- 
ing emotion.  Cuchulain  fights  man  after 
man  during  the  quest  of  the  Brown  Bull, 
and  not  one  of  those  fights  is  like  another, 
and  not  one  is  lacking  in  emotion  or  strange- 
ness ;  and  when  one  thinks  imagination  can 
do  no  more,  the  story  of  the  Two  Bulls, 
emblematic  of  all  contests,  suddenly  lifts 
romance  into  prophecy.  The  characters 
too  have  a  distinctness  we  do  not  find 
among  the  people  of  the  Mabinogion,  per- 
haps not  even  among  the  people  of  the 


LADY  GREGORY'S   TRANSLATIONS        9 

Morte  D^ Arthur.  We  know  we  shall  be 
long  forgetting  Cuchulain,  whose  life  is 
vehement  and  full  of  pleasure,  as  though 
he  always  remembered  that  it  was  to  be 
soon  over;  or  the  dreamy  Fergus  who 
betrays  the  sons  of  Usnach  for  a  feast, 
without  ceasing  to  be  noble ;  or  Conal  who 
is  fierce  and  friendly  and  trustworthy,  but 
has  not  the  sap  of  divinity  that  makes 
Cuchulain  mysterious  to  men,  and  be- 
loved of  women.  Women  indeed,  with 
their  lamentations  for  lovers  and  husbands 
and  sons,  and  for  fallen  rooftrees  and  lost 
wealth,  give  the  stories  their  most  beauti- 
ful sentences;  and,  after  Cuchulain,  one 
thinks  most  of  certain  great  queens  —  of 
angry,  amorous  Mseve,  with  her  long,  pale 
face ;  of  Findabair,  her  daughter,  who 
dies  of  shame  and  of  pity ;  of  Deirdre,  who 
might  be  some  mild  modern  housewife  but 
for  her  prophetic  wisdom.  If  one  does  not 
set  Deirdre's  lamentations  among  the  great- 
est lyric  poems  of  the  world,  I  think  one 
may  be  certain  that  the  wine-press  of  the 
poets  has  been  trodden  for  one  in  vain ; 
and  yet  I  think  it  may  be  proud  Emer, 


10      LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

Cuchulain's  fitting  wife,  who  will  linger 
longest  in  the  memory.  What  a  pure 
flame  burns  in  her  always,  whether  she 
is  the  newly-married  wife  fighting  for  pre- 
cedence, fierce  as  some  beautiful  bird,  or 
the  confident  housewife,  who  would  awaken 
her  husband  from  his  magic  sleep  with 
mocking  words;  or  the  great  queen  who 
would  get  him  out  of  the  tightening  net 
of  his  doom,  by  sending  him  into  the  Valley 
of  the  Deaf,  with  Niamh,  his  mistress, 
because  he  will  be  more  obedient  to  her; 
or  the  woman  whom  sorrow  has  set  with 
Helen  and  Iseult  and  Brunnhilda,  and 
Deirdre,  to  share  their  immortality  in  the 
rosary  of  the  poets. 

'"And  oh!  my  love!"  she  said,  "we 
were  often  in  one  another's  company,  and 
it  was  happy  for  us;  for  if  the  world  had 
been  searched  from  the  rising  of  the  sun 
to  sunset,  the  like  would  never  have  been 
found  in  one  place,  of  the  Black  Sainglain 
and  the  Grey  of  Macha,  and  Laeg  the 
chariot-driver,  and  myself  and  Cuchulain." 

'And  after  that  Emer  bade  Conal  to 
make  a  wide,  very  deep  grave  for  Cuchu- 


LADT  GBEGORT'S  TEANSLATIONS      11 

lain ;  and  she  laid  herself  down  beside  her 
gentle  comrade,  and  she  put  her  mouth  to  his 
mouth,  and  she  said :  ''Love  of  my  life,  my 
friend,  my  sweetheart,  my  one  choice  of  the 
men  of  the  earth,  many  is  the  woman,  wed 
or  unwed,  envied  me  until  to-day ;  and  now 
I  will  not  stay  living  after  you."  ' 

To  us  Irish,  these  personages  should  be 
very  moving,  very  important,  for  they 
lived  in  the  places  where  we  ride  and  go 
marketing,  and  sometimes  they  have  met 
one  another  on  the  hills  that  cast  their 
shadows  upon  our  doors  at  evening.  If 
we  will  but  tell  these  stories  to  our  chil- 
dren the  Land  will  begin  again  to  be  a  Holy 
Land,  as  it  was  before  men  gave  their  hearts 
to  Greece  and  Rome  and  Judea.  When  I 
was  a  child  I  had  only  to  climb  the  hill 
behind  the  house  to  see  long,  blue,  ragged 
hills  flowing  along  the  southern  horizon. 
What  beauty  was  lost  to  me,  what  depth 
of  emotion  is  still  perhaps  lacking  in  me, 
because  nobody  told  me,  not  even  the 
merchant  captains  who  knew  everything, 
that  Cruachan  of  the  Enchantments  lay 
behind  those  long,  blue,  ragged  hills ! 


12      LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS 
II 

FION  AND   HIS   CYCLE 

A  FEW  months  ago  I  was  on  the  bare 
Hill  of  Allen,  'wide  Almhuin  of  Leinster/ 
where  Finn  and  the  Fianna  are  said  to 
have  had  their  house,  although  there  are 
no  earthen  mounds  there  like  those  that 
mark  the  sites  of  old  houses  on  so  many 
hills.  A  hot  sun  beat  down  upon  flower- 
ing gorse  and  flowerless  heather;  and  on 
every  side  except  the  east,  where  there 
were  green  trees  and  distant  hills,  one  saw 
a  level  horizon  and  brown  boglands  with 
a  few  green  places  and  here  and  there  the 
glitter  of  water.  One  could  imagine  that 
had  it  been  twilight  and  not  early  after- 
noon, and  had  there  been  vapours  drifting 
and  frothing  where  there  were  now  but 
shadows  of  clouds,  it  would  have  set  stir- 
ring in  one,  as  few  places  even  in 
Ireland  can,  a  thought  that  is  peculiar  to 
Celtic  romance,  as  I  think,  a  thought  of 


LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS      13 

a  mystery  coming  not  as  with  Gothic 
nations  out  of  the  pressure  of  darkness, 
but  out  of  great  spaces  and  windy  Hght. 
The  hill  of  Teamhair,  or  Tara,  as  it  is  now 
called,  with  its  green  mounds  and  its 
partly-wooded  sides,  and  its  more  gradual 
slope  set  among  fat  grazing  lands,  with 
great  trees  in  the  hedgerows,  had  brought 
before  one  imaginations,  not  of  heroes 
who  were  in  their  youth  for  hundreds  of 
years,  or  of  women  who  came  to  them  in 
the  likeness  of  hunted  fawns,  but  of  kings 
that  lived  brief  and  politic  lives,  and  of  the 
five  white  roads  that  carried  their  armies 
to  the  lesser  kingdoms  of  Ireland,  or 
brought  to  the  great  fair  that  had  given 
Teamhair  its  sovereignty  all  that  sought 
justice  or  pleasure  or  had  goods  to  barter. 
'  It  is  certain  that  we  must  not  confuse 
these  kings,  as  did  the  medieval  chroni- 
clers, with  those  half-divine  kings  of  Alm- 
huin.  The  chroniclers,  perhaps  because 
they  loved  tradition  too  well  to  cast  out 
utterly  much  that  they  dreaded  as  Chris- 
tians, and  perhaps  because  popular  im- 
agination had  begun  the  mixture,  have 


14      LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

mixed  one  with  another  ingeniously,  mak- 
ing Finn  the  head  of  a  kind  of  Militia 
under  Cormac  MacAi't,  who  is  supposed 
to  have  reigned  at  Teamhair  in  the  second 
century,  and  making  Grania,  who  travels 
to  enchanted  houses  under  the  cloak  of 
iEngus,  god  of  Love,  and  keeps  her  troub- 
ling beauty  longer  than  did  Helen  hers, 
Cormac's  daughter,  and  giving  the  stories 
of  the  Fianna,  although  the  impossible  has 
thrust  its  proud  finger  into  them  all,  a 
curious  air  of  precise  history.  It  is  only 
when  we  separate  the  stories  from  that 
medieval  pedantry,  that  we  recognise 
one  of  the  oldest  worlds  that  man  has 
imagined,  an  older  world  certainly  than 
we  find  in  the  stories  of  Cuchulain,  who 
lived,  according  to  the  chroniclers,  about 
the  time  of  the  birth  of  Christ.  They  are 
far  better  known,  and  we  may  be  certain  of 
the  antiquity  of  incidents  that  are  known 
in  one  form  or  another  to  every  Gaelic- 
speaking  countryman  in  Ireland  or  in  the 
Highlands  of  Scotland.  Sometimes  a  la- 
bourer digging  near  to  a  cromlech,  or  Bed 
of  Diarmuid  and  Grania  as  it  is  called. 


LADY  GBEGOBY'S  TRANSLATIONS      15 

will  tell  you  a  tradition  that  seems  older 
and  more  barbaric  than  any  description 
of  their  adventm^es  or  of  themselves  in 
written  text  or  in  story  that  has  taken 
form  in  the  mouths  of  professed  story- 
tellers. Finn  and  the  Fianna  found  wel- 
come among  the  court  poets  later  than  did 
Cuchulain;  and  one  finds  memories  of 
Danish  invasions  and  standing  armies 
mixed  with  the  imaginations  of  hunters 
and  solitary  fighters  among  great  woods. 
We  never  hear  of  Cuchulain  delighting  in 
the  hunt  or  in  woodland  things;  and  one 
imagines  that  the  story-teller  would  have 
thought  it  unworthy  in  so  great  a  man, 
who  lived  a  well-ordered,  elaborate  life, 
and  could  delight  in  his  chariot  and  his 
chariot-driver  and  his  barley-fed  horses.  If 
he  is  in  the  woods  before  dawn  we  are  not 
told  that  he  cannot  know  the  leaves  of  the 
hazel  from  the  leaves  of  the  oak ;  and  when 
Emer  laments  him  no  wild  creature  comes 
into  her  thoughts  but  the  cuckoo  that 
cries  over  cultivated  fields.  His  story 
must  have  come  out  of  a  time  when  the 
wild  wood  was  giving  way  to  pasture  and 


16      LADT  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

tillage,  and  men  had  no  longer  a  reason 
to  consider  every  cry  of  the  birds  or  change 
of  the  night.  Finn,  who  was  always  in  the 
woods,  whose  battles  were  but  hours  amid 
years  of  hunting,  delighted  in  the  'cack- 
ling of  ducks  from  the  Lake  of  the  Three 
Narrows;  the  scolding  talk  of  the  black- 
bird of  Doire  an  Cairn;  the  bellowing  of 
the  ox  from  the  Valley  of  the  Berries; 
the  whistle  of  the  eagle  from  the  Valley 
of  Victories  or  from  the  rough  branches  of 
the  Ridge  of  the  Stream ;  the  grouse  of  the 
heather  of  Cruachan ;  the  call  of  the  otter 
of  Druim  re  Coir.'  When  sorrow  comes 
upon  the  queens  of  the  stories,  they  have 
sympathy  for  the  wild  birds  and  beasts 
that  are  like  themselves :  '  Credhe  wife 
of  Cael  came  with  the  others  and  went 
looking  through  the  bodies  for  her  comely 
comrade,  and  crying  as  she  went.  And 
as  she  was  searching  she  saw  a  crane  of 
the  meadows  and  her  two  nestlings,  and 
the  cunning  beast  the  fox  watching  the 
nestlings;  and  when  the  crane  covered 
one  of  the  birds  to  save  it,  he  would  make 
a  rush  at  the  other  bird,  the  way  she  had 


LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS     17 

to  stretch  herself  out  over  the  birds ;  and 
she  would  sooner  have  got  her  own  death 
by  the  fox  than  the  nestlings  to  be  killed 
by  him.  And  Credhe  was  looking  at  that, 
and  she  said :  ''It  is  no  wonder  I  to  have 
such  love  for  my  comely  sweetheart,  and 
the  bird  in  that  distress  about  her  nest- 
lings."' 

One  often  hears  of  a  horse  that  shivers 
with  terror,  or  of  a  dog  that  howls  at 
something  a  man's  eyes  cannot  see,  and 
men  who  live  primitive  lives  where  in- 
stinct does  the  work  of  reason  are  fully 
conscious  of  many  things  that  we  cannot 
perceive  at  all.  As  life  becomes  more 
orderly,  more  deliberate,  the  supernatural 
world  sinks  farther  away.  Although  the 
gods  come  to  Cuchulain,  and  although  he 
is  the  son  of  one  of  the  greatest  of  them, 
their  country  and  his  are  far  apart,  and 
they  come  to  him  as  god  to  mortal;  but 
Finn  is  their  equal.  He  is  continually'  in 
their  houses ;  he  meets  with  Bodb  Dearg, 
and  ^ngus,  and  Mananan,  now  as  friend 
with  friend,  now  as  with  an  enemy  he  over- 
comes in  battle;  and  when  he  has  need 
c 


18      LADT  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

of  their  help  his  messenger  can  say :  'There 
is  not  a  king's  son  or  a  prince,  or  a  leader 
of  the  Fianna  of  Ireland,  without  having 
a  wife  or  a  mother  or  a  foster-mother  or 
a  sweetheart  of  the  Tuatha  de  Danaan.' 
When  the  Fianna  are  broken  up  at  last, 
after  hundreds  of  years  of  hunting,  it  is 
doubtful  that  he  dies  at  all,  and  certain  that 
he  comes  again  in  some  other  shape,  and 
Oisin,  his  son,  is  made  king  over  a  divine 
country.  The  birds  and  beasts  that  cross 
his  path  in  the  woods  have  been  fighting- 
men  or  great  enchanters  or  fair  women, 
and  in  a  moment  can  take  some  beautiful 
or  terrible  shape.  We  think  of  him  and  of 
his  people  as  great-bodied  men  with  large 
movements,  that  seem,  as  it  were,  flowing 
out  of  some  deep  below  the  shallow  stream 
of  personal  impulse,  men  that  have  broad 
brows  and  quiet  eyes  full  of  confidence  in 
a  good  luck  that  proves  every  day  afresh 
that  they  are  a  portion  of  the  strength 
of  things.  They  are  hardly  so  much 
individual  men  as  portions  of  universal 
nature,  like  the  clouds  that  shape  them- 
selves and  reshape  themselves  momentarily, 


LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS      19 

or  like  a  bird  between  two  boughs,  or  like 
the  gods  that  have  given  the  apples  and  the 
nuts;  and  yet  this  but  brings  them  the 
nearer  to  us,  for  we  can  remake  them  in  our 
image  when  we  will,  and  the  woods  are 
the  more  beautiful  for  the  thought.  Do 
we  not  always  fancy  hunters  to  be  some- 
thing like  this,  and  is  not  that  why  we 
think  them  poetical  when  we  meet  them 
of  a  sudden,  as  in  these  lines  in  Pauline  f 

'  An  old  hunter 
Talking  with  gods ;  or  a  high-crested  chief 
SaiUng  with  troops  of  friends  to  Tenedos.' 

One  must  not  expect  in  these  stories  the 
epic  lineaments,  the  many  incidents  woven 
into  one  great  event  of,  let  us  say,  the  story 
of  the  War  for  the  Brown  Bull  of  Cuailgne, 
or  that  of  the  last  gathering  at  Muir- 
themne.  Even  Diarmuid  and  Grania, 
which  is  a  long  story,  has  nothing  of  the 
clear  outlines  of  Deirdre,  and  is  indeed 
but  a  succession  of  detached  episodes. 
The  men  who  imagined  the  Fianna  had 
the  imagination  of  children,  and  as  soon 
as  they  had  invented  one  wonder,  heaped 
another  on  top  of  it.     Children  —  or,  at 


20      LADY  GREGORY'S   TRANSLATIONS 

any  rate,  it  is  so  I  remember  my  own  child- 
hood —  do  not  understand  large  design, 
and  they  delight  in  little  shut-in  places 
where  they  can  play  at  houses  more  than 
in  great  expanses  where  a  country-side 
takes,  as  it  were,  the  impression  of  a 
thought.  The  wild  creatures  and  the 
green  things  are  more  to  them  than  to 
us,  for  they  creep  towards  our  Hght  by 
little  holes  and  crevices.  When  they 
imagine  a  country  for  themselves  it  is 
always  a  country  where  you  can  wander 
without  aim,  and  where  you  can  never 
know  from  one  place  what  another  will  be 
like,  or  know  from  the  one  day's  adven- 
ture what  may  meet  you  with  to-morrow's 
sun. 

Children  play  at  being  great  and  won- 
derful people,  at  the  ambitions  they  will 
put  away  for  one  reason  or  another  before 
they  grow  into  ordinary  men  and  women. 
Mankind  as  a  whole  had  a  like  dream  once ; 
everybody  and  nobody  built  up  the  dream 
bit  by  bit,  and  the  ancient  story-tellers  are 
there  to  make  us  remember  what  mankind 
would  have  been  like,  had  not  fear  and  the 


LADY  GBEGOBT'S  TBANSLATIONS     21 

failing  will  and  the  laws  of  nature  tripped  up 
its  heels.  The  Fianna  and  their  like  are 
themselves  so  full  of  power,  and  they  are 
set  in  a  world  so  fluctuating  and  dream- 
like, that  nothing  can  hold  them  from 
being  all  that  the  heart  desires. 

I  have  read  in  a  fabulous  book  that 
Adam  had  but  to  imagine  a  bird  and  it 
was  born  into  life,  and  that  he  created  all 
things  out  of  himself  by  nothing  more  im- 
portant than  an  unflagging  fancy;  and 
heroes  who  can  make  a  ship  out  of  a  shav- 
ing have  but  little  less  of  the  divine  pre- 
rogatives. They  have  no  speculative 
thoughts  to  wander  through  eternity  and 
waste  heroic  blood ;  but  how  could  that  be 
otherwise  ?  for  it  is  at  all  times  the  proud 
angels  who  sit  thinking  upon  the  hill-side 
and  not  the  people  of  Eden.  One  morn- 
ing we  meet  them  hunting  a  stag  that  is 
'as  joyful  as  the  leaves  of  a  tree  in  summer- 
time ' ;  and  whatever  they  do,  whether 
they  listen  to  the  harp  or  follow  an  en- 
chanter over-sea,  they  do  for  the  sake  of 
joy,  their  joy  in  one  another,  or  their  joy 
in  pride  and  movement;    and  even  their 


22      LADY  GBEGOBT'S  TRANSLATIONS 

battles  are  fought  more  because  of  their 
dehght  in  a  good  fighter  than  because  of 
any  gain  that  is  in  victory.  They  Hve 
always  as  if  they  were  playing  a  game; 
and  so  far  as  they  have  any  deliberate 
purpose  at  all,  it  is  that  they  may  become 
great  gentlemen  and  be  worthy  of  the 
songs  of  the  poets.  It  has  been  said,  and  I 
think  the  Japanese  were  the  first  to  say  it, 
that  the  four  essential  virtues  are  to  be 
generous  among  the  weak,  and  truthful 
among  one's  friends,  and  brave  among 
one's  enemies,  and  courteous  at  all  times ; 
and  if  we  understand  by  courtesy  not 
merely  the  gentleness  the  story-tellers 
have  celebrated,  but  a  delight  in  courtly 
things,  in  beautiful  clothing  and  in  beau- 
tiful verse,  one  understands  that  it  was  no 
formal  succession  of  trials  that  bound  the 
Fianna  to  one  another.  Only  the  Table 
Round,  that  is  indeed,  as  it  seems,  a  rivulet 
from  the  same  well-head,  is  bomid  in  a  like 
fellowship,  and  there  the  four  heroic  virtues 
are  troubled  by  the  abstract  virtues  of  the 
cloister.  Every  no,w  and  then  some  noble 
knight  builds  a  cell  upon  the  hill-side,  or 


LADT  GREGOBY'S  TRANSLATIONS      23 

leaves  kind  women  and  joyful  knights  to 
seek  the  vision  of  the  Grail  in  lonely  ad- 
ventures. But  when  Oisin  or  some  kingly 
forerunner  —  Bran,  son  of  Febal,  or  the 
like  —  rides  or  sails  in  an  enchanted  ship 
to  some  divine  country,  he  but  looks  for  a 
more  delighted  companionship,  or  to  be  in 
love  with  faces  that  will  never  fade.  No 
thought  of  any  life  greater  than  that  of 
love,  and  the  companionship  of  those  that 
have  drawn  their  swords  upon  the  dark- 
ness of  the  world,  ever  troubles  their 
delight  in  one  another  as  it  troubles  Iseult 
amid  her  love,  or  Arthur  amid  his  battles. 
It  is  an  ailment  of  our  speculation  that 
thought,  when  it  is  not  the  planning  of 
something,  or  the  doing  of  something,  or 
some  memory  of  a  plain  circumstance, 
separates  us  from  one  another  because  it 
makes  us  always  more  unlike,  and  because 
no  thought  passes  through  another's  ear 
unchanged.  Companionship  can  only  be 
perfect  when  it  is  founded  on  things,  for 
things  are  always  the  same  under  the 
hand,  and  at  last  one  comes  to  hear  with 
envy  the  voices  of  boys  lighting  a  lantern  to 


24      LADT  GEEGORY'S   TRANSLATIONS 

ensnare  moths,  or  of  the  maids  chattering  in 
the  kitchen  about  the  fox  that  carried  off  a 
tm-key  before  breakfast.  Lady  Gregory's 
book  of  tales  is  full  of  fellowship  untroubled 
like  theirs,  and  made  noble  by  a  courtesy 
that  has  gone  perhaps  out  of  the  world. 
I  do  not  know  in  literature  better  friends 
and  lovers.  When  one  of  -the  Fianna  finds 
Osgar  dying  the  proud  death  of  a  young 
man,  and  asks  is  it  well  with  him,  he  is 
answered,  '  I  am  as  you  would  have  me  be.' 
The  very  heroism  of  the  Fianna  is  indeed 
but  their  pride  and  joy  in  one  another, 
their  good  fellowship.  Goll,  old  and  savage, 
and  letting  himself  die  of  hunger  in  a  cave 
because  he  is  angry  and  sorry,  can  speak 
lovely  words  to  the  wife  whose  help  he 
refuses.  'It  is  best  as  it  is,'  he  said,  'and 
I  never  took  the  advice  of  a  woman  east 
or  west,  and  I  never  will  take  it.  And  oh, 
sweet- voiced  queen,'  he  said,  'what  ails 
you  to  be  fretting  after  me?  And  re- 
member now  your  silver  and  your  gold, 
and  your  silks  .  .  .  and  do  not  be  crying 
tears  after  me,  queen  with  the  white  hands,' 
he   said,    'but   remember   your   constant 


LADY  GBEGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS      25 

lover  Aodh,  son  of  the  best  woman  of  the 
world,  that  came  from  Spain  asking  for 
you,  and  that  I  fought  on  Corcar-an- 
Dearg ;  and  go  to  him  now,'  he  said,  '  for 
it  is  bad  when  a  woman  is  without  a  good 
man.' 

They  have  no  asceticism,  but  they  are 
more  visionary  than  any  ascetic,  and  their 
invisible  life  is  but  the  life  about  them  made 
more  perfect  and  more  lasting,  and  the 
invisible  people  are  their  own  images  in  the 
water.  Their  gods  may  have  been  much 
besides  this,  for  we  know  them  from  frag- 
ments of  mythology  picked  out  with 
trouble  from  a  fantastic  history  running 
backward  to  Adam  and  Eve,  and  many 
things  that  may  have  seemed  wicked  to  the 
monks  who  imagined  that  history,  may 
have  been  altered  or  left  out;  but  this 
they  must  have  been  essentially,  for  the 
old  stories  are  confirmed  by  apparitions 
among  the  country-people  to-day.  The 
Men  of  Dea  fought  against  the  mis-shapen 
Fomor,  as  Finn  fights  against  the  Cat- 
Heads  and  the  Dog-Heads;  and  when 
they  are  overcome  at  last  by  men,  they 


26      LADY  GREGOBY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

make  themselves  houses  in  the  hearts 
of  hills  that  are  like  the  houses  of  men. 
When  they  call  men  to  their  houses  and 
to  their  Country  Under- Wave  they  prom- 
ise them  all  that  they  have  upon  earth, 
only  in  greater  abundance.  The  god  Mid- 
hir  sings  to  Queen  Etain  in  one  of  the  most 
beautiful  of  the  stories :  '  The  young  never 
grow  old;  the  fields  and  the  flowers  are 
as  pleasant  to  be  looking  at  as  the  black- 
bird's eggs;  warm  streams  of  mead  and 
wine  flow  through  that  country;  there  is 
no  care  or  no  sorrow  on  any  person;  we 
see  others,  but  we  ourselves  are  not  seen.' 
These  gods  are  indeed  more  wise  and 
beautiful  than  men ;  but  men,  when  they  are 
great  men,  are  stronger  than  they  are,  for 
men  are,  as  it  were,  the  foaming  tide-line 
of  their  sea.  One  remembers  the  Druid 
who  answered,  when  someone  asked  him 
who  made  the  world,  'The  Druids  made 
it.'  All  was  indeed  but  one  life  flowing 
everjrwhere,  and  taking  one  quality  here, 
another  there.  It  sometimes  seems  as  if 
there  is  a  kind  of  day  and  night  of  religion, 
and  that  a  period  when  the  influences  are 


LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS      27 

those  that  shape  the  world  is  followed  by 
a  period  when  the  greater  power  is  in 
influences  that  would  lui'e  the  soul  out  of 
the  world,  out  of  the  body.  When  Oisin 
is  speaking  with  St.  Patrick  of  the  friends 
and  the  life  he  has  outlived,  he  can  but 
cry  out  constantly  against  a  religion 
that  has  no  meaning  for  him.  He  laments, 
and  the  country-people  have  remembered 
his  words  for  centuries:  'I  will  cry  my 
fill,  but  not  for  God,  but  because  Finn  and 
the  Fianna  are  not  living.' 

Old  writers  had  an  admirable  symbolism 
that  attributed  certain  energies  to  the 
influence  of  the  sun,  and  certain  others  to 
the  lunar  influence.  To  lunar  influence 
belong  all  thoughts  and  emotions  that 
were  created  by  the  community,  by  the 
common  people,  by  nobody  knows  who, 
and  to  the  sun  all  that  came  from  the 
high  disciphned  or  individual  kingly  mind. 
I  myself  imagine  a  marriage  of  the  sun  and 
moon  in  the  arts  I  take  most  pleasure  in ; 
and  now  bride  and  bridegroom  but  ex- 
change, as  it  were,  full  cups  of  gold  and 
silver,  and  now  they  are  one  in  a  mystical 


28      LADY  GEEGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

embrace.  From  the  moon  come  the  folk- 
songs imagined  by  reapers  and  spinners 
out  of  the  common  impulse  of  their  labour, 
and  made  not  by  putting  words  together, 
but  by  mixing  verses  and  phrases,  and  the 
folk-tales  made  by  the  capricious  mixing 
of  incidents  known  to  everybody  in  new 
ways,  as  one  deals  out  cards,  never  getting 
the  same  hand  twice  over.  When  one 
hears  some  fine  story,  one  never  knows 
whether  it  has  not  been  hazard  that  put 
the  last  touch  of  adventure.  Such  poetry, 
as  it  seems  to  me,  desires  an  infinity  of 
wonder  or  emotion,  for  where  there  is  no 
individual  mind  there  is  no  measm^er-out, 
no  marker-in  of  limits.  The  poor  fisher 
has  no  possession  of  the  world  and  no  re- 
sponsibility for  it ;  and  if  he  dreams  of  a 
love-gift  better  than  the  brown  shawl 
that  seems  too  common  for  poetry,  why 
should  he  not  dream  of  a  glove  made  from 
the  skin  of  a  bird,  or  shoes  made  from  the 
skin  of  a  herring,  or  a  coat  made  from  the 
glittering  garment  of  the  salmon  ?  Was  it 
not  ^schylus  who  said  he  but  served 
up  fragments  from  the  banquet  of  Homer  ? 


LADY  GBEGOEY'S  TRANSLATIONS     29 

—  but  Homer  himself  found  the  great 
banquet  of  an  earthen  floor  and  under  a 
broken  roof.  We  do  not  know  who  at  the 
foundation  of  the  world  made  the  banquet 
for  the  first  time,  or  who  put  the  pack  of 
cards  into  rough  hands ;  but  we  do  know 
that,  unless  those  that  have  made  many- 
inventions  are  about  to  change  the  nature 
of  poetry,  we  may  have  to  go  where  Homer 
went  if  we  are  to  sing  a  new  song.  Is  it 
because  all  that  is  under  the  moon  thirsts 
to  escape  out  of  bounds,  to  lose  itself  in 
some  unbounded  tidal  stream,  that  the 
songs  of  the  folk  are  mournful,  and  that  the 
story  of  the  Fianna,  whenever  the  queens 
lament  for  their  lovers,  reminds  us  of 
songs  that  are  still  sung  in  country- 
places?  Their  grief,  even  when  it  is  to 
be  brief  like  Crania's,  goes  up  into  the 
waste  places  of  the  sky.  But  in  supreme 
art,  or  in  supreme  life  there  is  the  in- 
fluence of  the  sun  too,  and  the  sun 
brings  with  it,  as  old  writers  tell  us,  not 
merely  discipline  but  joy ;  for  its  discipline 
is  not  of  the  kind  the  multitudes  impose 
upon  us  by  their  weight  and  pressure,  but 


30      LADY  GBEGOBY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

the  expression  of  the  individual  soul,  turn- 
ing itself  into  a  pure  fire  and  imposing  its 
own  pattern,  its  own  music,  upon  the  heavi- 
ness and  the  dumbness  that  is  in  others 
and  in  itself.  When  we  have  drunk  the  cold 
cup  of  the  moon's  intoxication,  we  thirst  for 
something  beyond  ourselves,  and  the  mind 
flows  outward  to  a  natural  inunensity; 
but  if  we  have  drunk  from  the  hot  cup 
of  the  sun,  our  own  fulness  awakens,  we 
desire  little,  for  wherever  one  goes  one's 
heart  goes  too ;  and  if  any  ask  what  music 
is  the  sweetest,  we  can  but  answer,  as 
Finn  answered,  'What  happens.'  And 
yet  the  songs  and  stories  that  have  come 
from  either  influence  are  a  part,  neither 
less  than  the  other,  of  the  pleasure  that  is 
the  bride-bed  of  poetry. 

Gaelic-speaking  Ireland,  because  its  art 
has  been  made,  not  by  the  artist  choosing 
his  material  from  wherever  he  has  a  mind 
to,  but  by  adding  a  little  to  something 
which  it  has  taken  generations  to  invent, 
has  always  had  a  popular  literature.  We 
cannot  say  how  much  that  literature  has 
done  for  the  vigour  of  the  race,  for  who 


LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS      31 

can  count  the  hands  its  praise  of  kings 
and  high-hearted  queens  made  hot  upon 
the  sword-hilt,  or  the  amorous  eyes  it 
made  lustful  for  strength  and  beauty? 
We  remember  indeed  that  when  the  farming 
people  and  the  labourers  of  the  towns  made 
their  last  attempt  to  cast  out  England  by 
force  of  arms  they  named  themselves  after 
the  companions  of  Finn.  Even  when 
Gaelic  has  gone  and  the  poetry  with  it, 
something  of  the  habit  of  mind  remains 
in  ways  of  speech  and  thought  and  '  come- 
all-ye's'  and  poetical  sayings;  nor  is  it 
only  among  the  poor  that  the  old  thought 
has  been  for  strength  or  weakness.  Surely 
these  old  stories,  whether  of  Finn  or  Cu- 
chulain,  helped  to  sing  the  old  Irish  and 
the  old  Norman-Irish  aristocracy  to  their 
end.  They  heard  their  hereditary  poets 
and  story-tellers,  and  they  took  to  horse 
and  died  fighting  against  Elizabeth  or 
against  Cromwell;  and  when  an  English- 
speaking  aristocracy  had  their  place,  it 
listened  to  no  poetry  indeed,  but  it  felt 
about  it  in  the  popular  mind  an  exacting 
and  ancient  tribunal,  and  began  a  play  that 


32     LADT  GBEGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

had  for  spectators  men  and  women  that 
loved  the  high  wasteful  virtues.  I  do  not 
think  that  their  own  mixed  blood  or  the 
habit  of  their  time  need  take  all,  or  nearly 
all,  credit  or  discredit  for  the  impulse  that 
made  those  gentlemen  of  the  eighteenth 
century  fight  duels  over  pocket-handker- 
chiefs, and  set  out  to  play  ball  against  the 
gates  of  Jerusalem  for  a  wager,  and  scatter 
money  before  the  public  eye;  and  at 
last,  after  an  epoch  of  such  eloquence  the 
world  has  hardly  seen  its  like,  lose  their 
public  spirit  and  their  high  heart,  and 
grow  querulous  and  selfish,  as  men  do  who 
have  played  life  out  not  heartily  but  with 
noise  and  tumult.  Had  they  known  the 
people  and  the  game  a  little  better,  they 
might  have  created  an  aristocracy  in  an 
age  that  has  lost  the  understanding  of  the 
word.  When  one  reads  of  the  Fianna,  or 
of  Cuchulain,  or  of  any  of  their  like,  one 
remembers  that  the  fine  life  is  always  a 
part  played  finely  before  fine  spectators. 
There  also  one  notices  the  hot  cup  and  the 
cold  cup  of  intoxication;  and  when  the 
fine  spectators  have  ended,  surely  the  fine 


LADY  GREGORY'S  TRANSLATIONS      33 

players  grow  weary,  and  aristocratic  life 
is  ended.  When  O'Connell  covered  with  a 
dark  glove  the  hand  that  had  killed  a  man 
in  the  duelling-field,  he  played  his  part; 
and  when  Alexander  stayed  his  army 
marching  to  the  conquest  of  the  world 
that  he  might  contemplate  the  beauty  of 
a  plane-tree,  he  played  his  part.  When 
Osgar  complained  as  he  lay  dying  of  the 
keening  of  the  women  and  the  old  fighting- 
men,  he  too  played  his  part ;  '  No  man  ever 
knew  any  heart  in  me,'  he  said,  'but  a 
heart  of  twisted  horn,  and  it  covered  with 
iron;  but  the  howhng  of  the  dogs  beside 
me,'  he  said,  'and  the  keening  of  the  old 
fighting-men  and  the  crying  of  the  women 
one  after  another,  those  are  the  things  that 
are  vexing  me.'  If  we  would  create  a 
great  community  —  and  what  other  game 
is  so  worth  the  labour  ?  —  we  must  re- 
create the  old  foundations  of  life,  not  as 
they  existed  in  that  splendid  misunder- 
standing of  the  eighteenth  century,  but 
as  they  must  always  exist  when  the  finest 
minds  and  Ned  the  beggar  and  Seaghan 
the ,  fool    think    about    the    same    thing, 


34      LADT  GBEGOEY'S  TRANSLATIONS 

although  they  may  not  think  the  same 
thought  about  it. 

When  I  asked  the  Uttle  boy  who  had 
shown  me  the  pathway  up  the  Hill  of 
Allen  if  he  knew  stories  of  Finn  and 
Oisin,  he  said  he  did  not,  but  that  he  had 
often  heard  his  grandfather  teUing  them 
to  his  mother  in  Irish.  He  did  not  know 
Irish,  but  he  was  learning  it  at  school,  and 
all  the  little  boys  he  knew  were  learning  it. 
In  a  little  while  he  will  know  enough 
stories  of  Finn  and  Oisin  to  tell  them  to 
his  children  some  day.  It  is  the  owners  of 
the  land  whose  children  might  never  have 
known  what  would  give  them  so  much 
happiness.  But  now  they  can  read  Lady 
Gregory's  book  to  their  children,  and  it 
will  make  Slieve-na-man,  Allen,  and  Ben- 
bulben,  the  great  mountain  that  showed 
itself  before  me  every  day  through  all  my 
childhood  and  was  yet  unpeopled,  and 
half  the  country-sides  of  south  and  west, 
as  populous  with  memories  as  her  Cuchu- 
lain  of  Muirthemne  will  have  made  Dun- 
dealgan  and  Emain  Macha  and  Muir- 
themne ;  and  after  a  while  somebody  may 


LADY  GBEGOBY'S  TRANSLATIONS      35 

even  take  them  to  some  famous  place  and 
say,  'This  land  where  yom"  fathers  lived 
proudly  and  finely  should  be  dear  and  dear 
and  again  dear  ; '  and  perhaps  when  many 
names  have  grown  musical  to  their  ears, 
a  more  imaginative  love  will  have  taught 
them  a  better  service. 

Ill 

I  praise  but  in  brief  words  the  noble  writ- 
ing of  these  books,  for  words  that  praise  a 
book,  wherein  something  is  done  supremely 
well,  remain,  to  sound  in  the  ears  of  a 
later  generation,  like  the  foolish  sound  of 
church  bells  from  the  tower  of  a  church 
when  every  pew  is  full. 

1903. 


PREFACE  TO  THE  FIRST  EDITION 
OF  THE  WELL  OF  THE  SAINTS 

Six  years  ago  I  was  staying  in  a  students' 
hotel  in  the  Latin  Quarter,  and  somebody, 
whose  name  I  cannot  recollect,  introduced 
me  to  an  Irishman,  who,  even  poorer  than 
myself,  had  taken  a  room  at  the  top  of  the 
house.  It  was  J.  M.  Synge,  and  I,  who 
thought  I  knew  the  name  of  every  Irish- 
man who  was  working  at  literature, 
had  never  heard  of  him.  He  was  a 
graduate  of  Trinity  College,  Dubhn,  too, 
and  Trinity  College  does  not,  as  a  rule, 
produce  artistic  minds.  He  told  me  that 
he  had  been  living  in  France  and  Germany, 
reading  French  and  German  Literatm^e, 
and  that  he  wished  to  become  a  writer. 
He  had,  however,  nothing  to  show  but  one 
or  two  poems  and  impressionistic  essays, 
full  of  that  kind  of  morbidity  that  has  its 
root  in  too  much  brooding  over  methods 
of  expression,  and  ways  of  looking  upon 
life,  which  come,  not  out  of  life,  but  out 
36 


PREFACE  OF  THE  WELL   OF  SAINTS     37 

of  literature,  images  reflected  from  mirror 
to  mirror.  He  had  wandered  among 
people  whose  life  is  as  picturesque  as  the 
middle  ages,  playing  his  fiddle  to  Itahan 
sailors,  and  listening  to  stories  in  Bavarian 
woods,  but  life  had  cast  no  light  into  his 
writings.  He  had  learned  Irish  years  ago, 
but  had  begun  to  forget  it,  for  the  only 
language  that  interested  him  was  that 
conventional  language  of  modern  poetry 
which  has  begun  to  make  us  all  weary. 
I  was  very  weary  of  it,  for  I  had  finished 
The  Secret  Rose,  and  felt  how  it  had 
separated  my  imagination  from  life,  send- 
ing my  Red  Hanrahan,  who  should  have 
trodden  the  same  roads  with  myself, 
into  some  undiscoverable  country.  I  said, 
'Give  up  Paris,  you  will  never  create  any- 
thing by  reading  Racine,  and  Arthur 
Symons  will  always  be  a  better  critic  of 
French  literature.  Go  to  the  Arran 
Islands.  Live  there  as  if  you  were  one  of 
the  people  themselves;  express  a  life 
that  has  never  found  expression.'  I  had 
just  come  from  Arran,  and  my  imagina- 
tion was  full  of  those  grey  islands  where 


38     PREFACE  OF  THE  WELL  OF  SAINTS 

men  must  reap  with  knives  because  of  the 
stones. 

He  went  to  Arran  and  became  a  part  of 
its  life,  living  upon  salt  fish  and  eggs, 
talking  Irish  for  the  most  part,  but  listen- 
ing also  to  the  beautiful  English  which  has 
grown  up  in  Irish-speaking  districts,  and 
takes  its  vocabulary  from  the  time  of 
Malory  and  of  the  translators  of  the 
Bible,  but  its  idiom  and  its  vivid  metaphor 
from  Irish.  When  Mr.  Synge  began  to 
write  in  this  language.  Lady  Gregory  had 
already  used  it  finely  in  her  translations  of 
Dr.  Hyde's  lyrics  and  plays,  or  of  old  Irish 
literature,  but  she  had  listened  with  differ- 
ent ears.  He  made  his  own  selection  of 
word  and  phrase,  choosing  what  would 
express  his  own  personality.  Above  all, 
he  made  word  and  phrase  dance  to  a  very 
strange  rhythm,  which  will  always,  till 
his  plays  have  created  their  own  tradition, 
be  difficult  to  actors  who  have  not  learned 
it  from  his  lips.  It  is  essential,  for  it 
perfectly  fits  the  drifting  emotion,  the 
dreaminess,  the  vague  yet  measureless 
desire,  for  which  he  would  create  a  dra- 


PREFACE   OF  TEE   WELL    OF  SAINTS      39 

matic  form.  It  blurs  definition,  clear  edges, 
everything  that  comes  from  the  will,  it 
turns  imagination  from  all  that  is  of  the 
present,  like  a  gold  background  in  a  reli- 
gious picture,  and  it  strengthens  in  every 
emotion  whatever  comes  to  it  from  far  off, 
from  brooding  memory  and  dangerous 
hope.  When  he  brought  The  Shadow  of  the 
Glen,  his  first  play,  to  the  Irish  National 
Theatre  Society,  the  players  were  puzzled 
by  the  rhythm,  but  gradually  they  became 
certain  that  his  woman  of  the  glens,  as 
melancholy  as  a  curlew,  driven  to  dis- 
traction by  her  own  sensitiveness,  her  own 
fineness,  could  not  speak  with  any  other 
tongue,  that  all  his  people  would  change 
their  life  if  the  rhythm  changed.  Perhaps 
no  Irish  countryman  had  ever  that  exact 
rhythm  in  his  voice,  but  certainly  if  Mr. 
Synge  had  been  born  a  countryman,  he 
would  have  spoken  like  that.  It  makes  the 
people  of  his  imagination  a  little  dis- 
embodied ;  it  gives  them  a  kind  of  inno- 
cence even  in  their  anger  and  their  cursing. 
It  is  part  of  its  maker's  attitude  towards 
the  world,  for  while  it  makes  the  clash 


40     PREFACE  OF  THE  WELL  OF  SAINTS 

of  wills  among  his  persons  indirect  and 
dreamy,  it  helps  him  to  see  the  subject- 
matter  of  his  art  with  wise,  clear-seeing, 
unreflecting  eyes;  to  preserve  the  inno- 
cence of  good  art  in  an  age  of  reasons  and 
purposes.  Whether  he  write  of  old  beggars 
by  the  roadside,  lamenting  over  the  misery 
and  ugliness  of  hf  e,  or  of  an  old  Arran  woman 
mourning  her  drowned  sons,  or  of  a  young 
wife  married  to  an  old  husband,  he  has  no 
wish  to  change  anything,  to  reform  any- 
thing; all  these  people  pass  by  as  before 
an  open  window,  murmm-ing  strange,  ex- 
citing words. 

If  one  has  not  fine  construction,  one 
has  not  drama,  but  if  one  has  not  beautiful 
or  powerful  and  individual  speech,  one 
has  not  literature,  or,  at  any  rate,  one  has  not 
great  literature.  Rabelais,  Villon,  Shake- 
speare, Wilham  Blake,  would  have  known 
one  another  by  their  speech.  Some  of  them 
knew  how  to  construct  a  story,  but  all  of 
them  had  abundant,  resonant,  beautiful, 
laughing,  living  speech.  It  is  only  the 
writers  of  our  modern  dramatic  movement, 
our  scientific  dramatists,   our  naturalists 


PREFACE  OF  THE   WELL   OF  SAINTS     41 

of  the  stage,  who  have  thought  it  possible 
to  be  Hke  the  greatest,  and  yet  to  cast 
aside  even  the  poor  persiflage  of  the  come- 
dians, and  to  write  in  the  impersonal 
language  that  has  come,  not  out  of  individ- 
ual life,  nor  out  of  hfe  at  all,  but  out 
of  necessities  of  commerce,  of  parliament, 
of  board  schools,  of  hurried  journeys  by 
rail. 

If  there  are  such  things  as  decaying  art 
and  decaying  institutions,  their  decay 
must  begin  when  the  element  they  receive 
into  their  care  from  the  life  of  every  man 
in  the  world,  begins  to  rot.  Literature 
decays  when  it  no  longer  makes  more  beau- 
tiful, or  more  vivid,  the  language  which 
unites  it  to  all  life,  and  when  one  finds  the 
criticism  of  the  student,  and  the  purpose 
of  the  reformer,  and  the  logic  of  the  man 
of  science,  where  there  should  have  been 
the  reveries  of  the  common  heart,  ennobled 
into  some  raving  Lear  or  unabashed  Don 
Quixote.  One  must  not  forget  that  the 
death  of  language,  the  substitution  of 
phrases  as  nearly  impersonal  as  algebra  for 
words  and  rhythms  varying  from  man  to 


42     PREFACE  OF  TEE  WELL  OF  SAINTS 

man,  is  but  a  part  of  the  tyranny  of  im- 
personal things.  I  have  been  reading 
through  a  bundle  of  German  plays,  and 
have  found  everywhere  a  desire  not  to 
express  hopes  and  alarms  common  to 
every  man  that  ever  came  into  the  world, 
but  politics  or  social  passion,  a  veiled  or 
open  propaganda.  Now  it  is  duelling 
that  has  need  of  reproof;  now  it  is  the 
ideas  of  an  actress,  returning  from  the  free 
life  of  the  stage,  that  must  be  contrasted 
with  the  prejudice  of  an  old-fashioned 
town ;  now  it  is  the  hostility  of  Christianity 
and  Paganism  in  our  own  day  that  is  to 
find  an  obscure  symbol  in  a  bell  thrown 
from  its  tower  by  spirits  of  the  wood.  I 
compare  the  work  of  these  dramatists 
with  the  greater  plaj'^s  of  their  Scandina- 
vian master,  and  remember  that  even 
he,  who  has  made  so  many  clear-drawn 
characters,  has  made  us  no  abundant 
character,  no  man  of  genius  in  whom  we 
could  believe,  and  that  in  him  also,  even 
when  it  is  Emperor  and  Galilean  that  are 
face  to  face,  even  the  most  momentous 
figures  are  subordinate  to  some  tendency, 


J 


PBEFACE  OF  THE  WELL   OF  SAINTS     43 

to  some  movement,  to  some  inanimate 
energy,  or  to  some  process  of  thought 
whose  very  logic  has  changed  it  into 
mechanism  —  always  to  something  other 
than  human  life. 

We  must  not  measure  a  young  talent, 
whether  we  praise  or  blame,  with  that  of 
men  who  are  among  the  greatest  of  our 
time,  but  we  may  say  of  any  talent,  follow- 
ing out  a  definition,  that  it  takes  up  the 
tradition  of  great  drama  as  it  came  from 
the  hands  of  the  masters  who  are  acknow- 
ledged by  all  time,  and  turns  away  from  a 
dramatic  movement,  which,  though  it 
has  been  served  by  fine  talent,  has  been 
imposed  upon  us  by  science,  by  artificial 
life,  by  a  passing  order. 

When  the  individual  life  no  longer  de- 
lights in  its  own  energy,  when  the  body 
is  not  made  strong  and  beautiful  by  the 
activities  of  daily  life,  when  men  have 
no  delight  in  decorating  the  body,  one  may 
be  certain  that  one  lives  in  a  passing 
order,  amid  the  inventions  of  a  fading 
vitality.  If  Homer  were  alive  to-day,  he 
would  only  resist,  after  a  deliberate  struggle, 


44     PREFACE  OF  THE  WELL   OF  SAINTS 

the  temptation  to  find  his  subject  not  in 
Helen's  beauty,  that  every  man  has 
desired,  nor  in  the  wisdom  and  endurance 
of  Odysseus  that  has  been  the  desire  of 
every  woman  that  has  come  into  the  world, 
but  in  what  somebody  would  describe, 
perhaps,  as  'the  inevitable  contest,'  arising 
out  of  economic  causes,  between  the 
country-places  and  small  towns  on  the 
one  hand,  and,  upon  the  other,  the  great 
city  of  Troy,  representing  one  knows  not 
what  'tendency  to  centralisation.' 

Mr.  Synge  has  in  common  with  the 
great  theatre  of  the  world,  with  that  of 
Greece  and  that  of  India,  with  the  creator 
of  Falstaff,  with  Racine,  a  delight  in  lan- 
guage, a  preoccupation  with  individual 
life.  He  resembles  them  also  by  a  pre- 
occupation with  what  is  lasting  and  noble, 
that  came  to  him,  not  as  I  think  from  books, 
but  while  he  listened  to  old  stories  in  the 
cottages,  and  contrasted  what  they  remem- 
bered with  reality.  The  only  literature 
of  the  Irish  country-people  is  their  songs, 
full  often  of  extravagant  love,  and  their 
stories  of  kings  and  of  kings'  children.     'I 


PREFACE  OF  THE   WELL   OF  SAINTS     45 

will  cry  my  fill,  but  not  for  God,  but  be- 
cause Finn  and  the  Fianna  are  not  living,' 
says  Oisin  in  the  story.  Every  writer, 
even  every  small  writer,  who  has  belonged 
to  the  great  tradition,  has  had  his  dream 
of  an  impossibly  noble  life,  and  the  greater 
he  is,  the  more  does  it  seem  to  plunge  him 
into  some  beautiful  or  bitter  reverie. 
Some,  and  of  these  are  all  the  earliest  poets 
of  the  world,  gave  it  direct  expression; 
others  mingle  it  so  subtly  with  reality,  that 
it  is  a  day's  work  to  disentangle  it ;  others 
bring  it  near  by  showing  one  whatever  is 
most  its  contrary.  Mr.  Synge,  indeed, 
sets  before  us  ugly,  deformed  or  sinful 
people,  but  his  people,  moved  by  no  prac- 
tical ambition,  are  driven  by  a  dream  of 
that  impossible  life.  That  we  may  feel 
how  intensely  his  woman  of  the  glen 
dreams  of  days  that  shall  be  entirely  alive, 
she  that  is  '  a  hard  woman  to  please  '  must 
spend  her  days  between  a  sour-faced  old 
husband,  a  man  who  goes  mad  upon  the 
hills,  a  craven  lad  and  a  drunken  tramp ; 
and  those  two  blind  people  of  The  Well 
of  the  Saints  are  so  transformed  by  the 


46      PREFACE  OF  THE   WELL   OF  SAINTS 

dream,  that  they  choose  bhndness  rather 
than  reaUty.  He  tells  us  of  realities,  but 
he  knows  that  art  has  never  taken  more 
than  its  symbols  from  anything  that  the 
eye  can  see  or  the  hand  measure. 

It  is  the  preoccupation  of  his  characters 
with  their  dream  that  gives  his  plays  their 
drifting  movement,  their  emotional  subt- 
lety. In  most  of  the  dramatic  writing  of 
our  time,  and  this  is  one  of  the  reasons  why 
our  dramatists  do  not  find  the  need  for 
a  better  speech,  one  finds  a  simple  motive 
lifted,  as  it  were,  into  the  full  light  of  the 
stage.  The  ordinary  student  of  drama  will 
not  find  anywhere  in  The  Well  of  the  Saints 
that  excitement  of  the  will  in  the  presence 
of  attainable  advantages,  which  he  is 
accustomed  to  think  the  natural  stuff  of , 
drama,  and  if  he  see  it  played  he  will 
wonder  why  act  is  knitted  to  act  so  loosely, 
why  it  is  all,  as  it  were,  flat,  why  there  is 
so  much  leisure  in  the  dialogue,  even  in  the 
midst  of  passion.  If  he  see  the  Shadow 
of  the  Glen,  he  will  ask,  why  does  this 
woman  go  out  of  her  house?  Is  it  be- 
cause she  cannot  help  herself,  or  is  she  con- 


PREFACE  OF  THE  WELL   OF  SAINTS     47 

tent  to  go?  Wliy  is  it  not  all  made 
clearer?  And  yet,  like  everybody  when 
caught  up  into  great  events,  she  does 
many  things  without  being  quite  certain 
why  she  does  them.  She  hardly  under- 
stands at  moments  why  her  action  has  a 
certain  form,  more  clearly  than  why  her 
body  is  tall  or  short,  fair  or  brown.  She 
feels  an  emotion  that  she  does  not  under- 
stand. She  is  driven  by  desires  that  need 
for  their  expression,  not  'I  admire  this 
man,'  or  'I  must  go,  whether  I  will  or  no,' 
but  words  full  of  suggestion,  rhythms  of 
voice,  movements  that  escape  analysis. 
In  addition  to  all  this,  she  has  something 
that  she  shares  with  none  but  the  children 
of  one  man's  imagination.  She  is  intoxi- 
cated by  a  dream  which  is  hardly  under- 
stood by  herself,  but  possesses  her  like 
something  half  remembered  on  a  sudden 
wakening. 

While  I  write,  we  are  rehearsing  The 
Well  of  the  Saints,  and  are  painting  for  it 
decorative  scenery,  mountains  in  one  or 
two  fiat  colours  and  without  detail,  ash 
trees  and  red  salleys  with  something  of 


48      PREFACE  OF  THE   WELL   OF  SAINTS 

recurring  pattern  in  their  woven  boughs. 
For  though  the  people  of  the  play  use  no 
phrase  they  could  not  use  in  daily  life, 
we  know  that  we  are  seeking  to  express 
what  no  eye  has  ever  seen. 

Abbey  Theatre, 
January  27,  1905. 


DISCOVERIES 

PROPHET,   PRIEST   AND   KING 

The  little  theatrical  company  I  write  my 
plays  for  had  come  to  a  west  of  Ireland 
town,  and  was  to  give  a  performance  in  an 
old  ball-room,  for  there  was  no  other  room 
big  enough.  I  went  there  from  a  neigh- 
bouring country-house,  and,  arriving  a 
little  before  the  players,  tried  to  open  a 
window.  My  hands  were  black  with  dirt 
in  a  moment,  and  presently  a  pane  of  glass 
and  a  part  of  the  window-frame  came  out  in 
my  hands.  Everything  in  this  room  was 
half  in  ruins,  the  rotten  boards  cracked 
under  my  feet,  and  our  new  proscenium  and 
the  new  boards  of  the  platform  looked  out 
of  place,  and  yet  the  room  was  not  really 
old,  in  spite  of  the  musicians'  gallery  over 
the  stage.  It  had  been  built  by  some  ro- 
mantic or  philanthropic  landlord  some  three 
or  four  generations  ago,  and  was  a  memory 
of  we  knew  not  what  unfinished  scheme. 
E  49 


50  DISCOVERIES 

From  there  I  went  to  look  for  the  play- 
ers, and  called  for  information  on  a  young 
priest,  who  had  invited  them  and  taken 
upon  himself  the  finding  of  an  audience. 
He  lived  in  a  high  house  with  other  priests, 
and  as  I  went  in  I  noticed  with  a  whimsical 
pleasure  a  broken  pane  of  glass  in  the  fan- 
light over  the  door,  for  he  had  once  told 
me  the  story  of  an  old  woman  who  a  good 
many  years  ago  quarrelled  with  the  bishop, 
got  drunk  and  hurled  a  stone  through  the 
painted  glass.  He  was  a  clever  man  who 
read  Meredith  and  Ibsen,  but  some  of  his 
books  had  been  packed  in  the  fire-grate 
by  his  housekeeper,  instead  of  the  custom- 
ary view  of  an  Italian  lake  or  the  coloured 
tissue-paper.  The  players,  who  had  been 
giving  a  performance  in  a  neighbouring 
town,  had  not  yet  come,  or  were  unpacking 
their  costumes  and  properties  at  the  hotel 
he  had  recommended  them.  We  should 
have  time,  he  said,  to  go  through  the  half- 
ruined  town  and  to  visit  the  convent  schools 
and  the  cathedral,  where,  owing  to  his 
influence,  two  of  our  young  Irish  sculptors 
had  been  set  to  carve  an  altar  and  the  heads 


DISCOVERIES  51 

of  pillars.  I  had  only  heard  of  this  work, 
and  I  found  its  strangeness  and  simplicity 
—  one  of  them  had  been  Rodin's  pupil  — 
could  not  make  me  forget  the  meretri- 
ciousness  of  the  architecture  and  the  com- 
mercial commonplace  of  the  inlaid  pave- 
ment. The  new  movement  had  seized  on 
the  cathedral  midway  in  its  growth,  and 
the  worst  of  the  old  and  the  best  of  the  new 
were  side  by  side  without  any  sign  of  tran- 
sition. The  convent  school  was,  as  other 
like  places  have  been  to  me,  —  a  long  room 
in  a  workhouse  hospital  at  Portumna,  in 
particular,  —  a  delight  to  the  imagination 
and  the  eyes.  A  new  floor  had  been  put 
into  some  ecclesiastical  building  and  the 
light  from  a  great  mullioned  window,  cut 
off  at  the  middle,  fell  aslant  upon  rows  of 
clean  and  seemingly  happy  children.  The 
nuns,  who  show  in  their  own  convents, 
where  they  can  put  what  they  like,  a  love 
of  what  is  mean  and  pretty,  make  beauti- 
ful rooms  where  the  regulations  compel 
them  to  do  all  with  a  few  colours  and  a 
few  flowers.  I  think  it  was  that  day,  but 
am  not  sure,  that  I  had  lunch  at  a  convent 


62  DISCOVERIES 

and  told  fairy  stories  to  a  couple  of  nuns, 
and  I  hope  it  was  not  mere  politeness 
that  made  them  seem  to  have  a  child's 
interest  in  such  things. 

A  good  many  of  our  audience,  when 
the  curtain  went  up  in  the  old  ball-room, 
were  drunk,  but  all  were  attentive,  for 
they  had  a  great  deal  of  respect  for  my 
friend,  and  there  were  other  priests  there. 
Presently  the  man  at  the  door  opposite 
to  the  stage  strayed  off  somewhere  and 
I  took  his  place,  and  when  boys  came  up 
offering  two  or  three  pence  and  asking 
to  be  let  into  the  sixpenny  seats,  I  let 
them  join  the  melancholy  crowd.  The 
play  professed  to  tell  of  the  heroic  life 
of  ancient  Ireland,  but  was  really  full  of 
sedentary  refinement  and  the  spirituality 
of  cities.  Every  emotion  was  made  as 
dainty-footed  and  dainty-fingered  as 
might  be,  and  a  love  and  pathos  where 
passion  had  faded  into  sentiment,  emo- 
tions of  pensive  and  harmless  people, 
drove  shadowj'-  young  men  through  the 
shadows  of  death  and  battle.  I  watched 
it  with  growing  rage.     It  was  not  my  own 


DISCOVERIES  53 

work,  but  I  have  sometimes  watched  my 
own  work  with  a  rage  made  all  the  more 
salt  in  the  mouth  from  being  half  despair. 
Why  should  we  make  so  much  noise  about 
ourselves  and  yet  have  nothing  to  say  that 
was  not  better  said  in  that  workhouse 
dormitory,  where  a  few  flowers  and  a  few 
coloured  counterpanes  and  the  coloured 
walls  had  made  a  severe  and  gracious 
beauty  ?  Presently  the  play  was  changed 
and  our  comedian  began  to  act  a  little 
farce,  and  when  I  saw  him  struggle  to 
wake  into  laughter  an  audience  out  of 
whom  the  life  had  run  as  if  it  were  water, 
I  rejoiced,  as  I  had  over  that  broken 
window-pane.  Here  was  something  secu- 
lar, abounding,  even  a  little  vulgar,  for 
he  was  gagging  horribly,  condescending 
to  his  audience,  though  not  without  con- 
tempt. 

We  had  supper  in  the  priest's  house,  and 
a  government  official  who  had  come  down 
from  Dublin,  partly  out  of  interest  in  this 
attempt  'to  educate  the  people,'  and  partly 
because  it  was  his  holiday  and  it  was 
necessary  to  go  somewhere,  entertained  us 


54  DISCOVERIES 

with  little  jokes.  Somebody,  not,  I  think, 
a  priest,  talked  of  the  spiritual  destiny  of 
our  race  and  praised  the  night's  work,  for 
the  play  was  refined  and  the  people  really 
very  attentive,  and  he  could  not  under- 
stand my  discontent;  but  presently  he 
was  silenced  by  the  patter  of  jokes. 

I  had  my  breakfast  by  myself  the  next 
morning,  for  the  players  had  got  up  in  the 
middle  of  the  night  and  driven  some  ten 
miles  to  catch  an  early  train  to  Dublin,  and 
were  already  on  their  way  to  their  shops 
and  offices.  I  had  brought  the  visitors' 
book  of  the  hotel,  to  turn  over  its  pages 
while  waiting  for  my  bacon  and  eggs,  and 
found  several  pages  full  of  obscenities, 
scrawled  there  some  two  or  three  weeks 
before,  by  Dublin  visitors,  it  seemed,  for 
a  notorious  Dublin  street  was  mentioned. 
Nobody  had  thought  it  worth  his  while  to 
tear  out  the  page  or  blacken  out  the  lines, 
and  as  I  put  the  book  away  impressions 
that  had  been  drifting  through  my  mind 
for  months  rushed  up  into  a  single  thought. 
'If  we  poets  are  to  move  the  people,  we 
must  reintegrate  the  human  spirit  in  our 


DISCOVERIES  55 

imagination.  The  English  have  driven 
away  the  kings,  and  turned  the  prophets 
into  demagogues,  and  you  cannot  have 
health  among  a  people  if  you  have  not 
prophet,  priest  and  king.' 


66  DISCOVERIES 


PERSONALITY  AND   THE  INTEL- 
LECTUAL  ESSENCES 

My  work  in  Ireland  has  continually  set 
this  thought  before  me :  '  How  can  I  make 
my  work  mean  something  to  vigorous  and 
simple  men  whose  attention  is  not  given 
to  art  but  to  a  shop,  or  teaching  in  a 
National  School,  or  dispensing  medicine  ? ' 
I  had  not  wanted  to  'elevate  them'  or  'edu- 
cate them,'  as  these  words  are  understood, 
but  to  make  them  understand  my  vision, 
and  I  had  not  wanted  a  large  audience, 
certainly  not  what  is  called  a  national 
audience,  but  enough  people  for  what  is 
accidental  and  temporary  to  lose  itself 
in  the  lump.  In  England,  where  there 
have  been  so  many  changing  activities 
and  so  much  systematic  education,  one 
only  escapes  from  crudities  and  temporary 
interests  among  students,  but  here  there 
is  the  right  audience,  could  one  but  get  its 
ears.  I  have  always  come  to  this  cer- 
tainty :  what  moves  natural  men  in  the 


DISCOVERIES  57 

arts  is  what  moves  them  in  Hfe,  and  that  is, 
intensity  of  personal  Hfe,  intonations  that 
show  them  in  a  book  or  a  play,  the  strength, 
the  essential  moment  of  a  man  who  would 
be  exciting  in  the  market  or  at  the  dispen- 
sary door.  They  must  go  out  of  the 
theatre  with  the  strength  they  live  by 
strengthened  with  looking  upon  some 
passion  that  could,  whatever  its  chosen 
way  of  hfe,  strike  down  an  enemy,  fill  a 
long  stocking  with  money  or  move  a  girl's 
heart.  They  have  not  much  to  do  with 
the  speculations  of  science,  though  they 
have  a  little,  or  with  the  speculations  of 
metaphysics,  though  they  have  a  little. 
Their  legs  will  tire  on  the  road  if  there  is 
nothing  in  their  hearts  but  vague  senti- 
ment, and  though  it  is  charming  to  have 
an  affectionate  feehng  about  flowers,  that 
will  not  pull  the  cart  out  of  the  ditch.  An 
exciting  person,  whether  the  hero  of  a  play 
or  the  maker  of  poems,  will  display  the 
greatest  volume  of  personal  energy,  and 
this  energy  must  seem  to  come  out  of  the 
body  as  out  of  the  mind.  We  must  say 
to  ourselves  continually  when  we  imagine 


58  DISCOVERIES 

a  character :  '  Have  I  given  him  the  roots, 
as  it  were,  of  all  faculties  necessary  for 
life?'  And  only  when  one  is  certain  of 
that  may  one  give  him  the  one  faculty  that 
fills  the  imagination  with  joy.  I  even 
doubt  if  any  play  had  ever  a  great  popular- 
ity that  did  not  use,  or  seem  to  use,  the 
bodily  energies  of  its  principal  actor  to  the 
full.  Villon  the  robber  could  have  de- 
lighted these  Irishmen  with  plays  and 
songs,  if  he  and  they  had  been  born  to  the 
same  traditions  of  word  and  symbol,  but 
Shelley  could  not;  and  as  men  came  to 
live  in  towns  and  to  read  printed  books 
and  to  have  many  specialised  activities,  it 
has  become  more  possible  to  produce 
Shelleys  and  less  and  less  possible  to  pro- 
duce Villous.  The  last  Villon  dwindled 
into  Robert  Burns  because  the  highest 
faculties  had  faded,  taking  the  sense  of 
beauty  with  them,  into  some  sort  of  vague 
heaven  and  left  the  lower  to  lumber  where 
they  best  could.  In  literature,  partly 
from  the  lack  of  that  spoken  word  which 
knits  us  to  normal  man,  we  have  lost  in 
personality,  in  our  delight  in  the  whole 


DISCOVERIES  59 

man  —  blood,  imagination,  intellect,  run- 
ning together  —  but  have  found  a  new 
delight,  in  essences,  in  states  of  mind,  in 
pure  imagination,  in  all  that  comes  to  us 
most  easily  in  elaborate  music.  There  are 
two  ways  before  literature  —  upward  into 
ever-growing  subtlety,  with  Verhaeren, 
with  Mallarm^,  with  Maeterlinck,  until  at 
last,  it  may  be,  a  new  agreement  among 
refined  and  studious  men  gives  birth  to  a 
new  passion,  and  what  seems  literature 
becomes  religion;  or  downward,  taking 
the  soul  with  us  until  all  is  simplijfied  and 
soHdified  again.  That  is  the  choice  of 
choices  —  the  way  of  the  bird  until  com- 
mon eyes  have  lost  us,  or  to  the  market 
carts ;  but  we  must  see  to  it  that  the  soul 
goes  with  us,  for  the  bird's  song  is  beauti- 
ful, and  the  traditions  of  modern  imagina- 
tion, growing  always  more  musical,  more 
lyrical,  more  melancholy,  casting  up  now 
a  Shelley,  now  a  Swinburne,  now  a  Wagner, 
are,  it  may  be,  the  frenzy  of  those  that  are 
about  to  see  what  the  magic  hymn  printed 
by  the  Abbe  de  Villars  has  called  the  Crown 
of  Living  and  Melodious  Diamonds.    If 


60  DISCOVERIES 

the  carts  have  hit  our  fancy  we  must  have 
the  soul  tight  within  our  bodies,  for  it  has 
grown  so  fond  of  a  beauty  accumulated  by 
subtle  generations  that  it  will  for  a  long 
time  be  impatient  with  our  thirst  for  mere 
force,  mere  personality,  for  the  tumult  of 
the  blood.  If  it  begin  to  slip  away  we 
must  go  after  it,  for  Shelley's  Chapel  of 
the  Morning  Star  is  better  than  Burns's 
beer-house  —  surely  it  was  beer,  not  bar- 
leycorn —  except  at  the  day's  weary  end ; 
and  it  is  always  better  than  that  uncom- 
fortable place  where  there  is  no  beer,  the 
machine  shop  of  the  realists. 


DISCOVERIES  61 


THE   MUSICIAN  AND  THE   ORATOR 

Walter  Pater  says  music  is  the  type 
of  all  the  Arts,  but  somebody  else,  I  forget 
now  who,  that  oratory  is  their  type.  You 
will  side  with  the  one  or  the  other  according 
to  the  nature  of  your  energy,  and  I  in  my 
present  mood  am  all  for  the  man  who,  with  an 
average  audience  before  him,  uses  all  means 
of  persuasion  —  stories,  laughter,  tears,  and 
but  so  much  music  as  he  can  discover  on  the 
wings  of  words.  I  would  even  avoid  the 
conversation  of  the  lovers  of  music,  who 
would  draw  us  into  the  impersonal  land  of 
sound  and  colour,  and  I  would  have  no  one 
write  with  a  sonata  in  his  memory.  We 
may  even  speak  a  little  evil  of  musicians, 
having  admitted  that  they  will  see  before  we 
do  that  melodious  crown.  We  may  remind 
them  that  the  housemaid  does  not  respect 
the  piano-tuner  as  she  does  the  plumber,  and 
of  the  enmity  that  they  have  aroused  among 
all  poets.  Music  is  the  most  impersonal  of 
things,  and  words  the  most  personal,  and  that 


62  mSCOVEEIES 

is  why  musicians  do  not  like  words.  They 
masticate  them  for  a  long  time,  being  afraid 
they  would  not  be  able  to  digest  them,  and 
when  the  words  are  so  broken  and  softened 
and  mixed  with  spittle  that  they  are  not 
words  any  longer,  they  swallow  them. 


DISCOVERIES  63 


A   GUITAR  PLAYER 

A  GIRL  has  been  playing  on  the  guitar. 
She  is  pretty,  and  if  I  didn't  Hsten  to  her 
I  could  have  watched  her,  and  if  I  didn't 
watch  her  I  could  have  listened.  Her 
voice,  the  movements  of  her  body,  the 
expression  of  her  face,  all  said  the  same 
thing.  A  player  of  a  different  temper 
and  body  would  have  made  all  different, 
and  might  have  been  delightful  in  some 
other  way.  A  movement  not  of  music  only 
but  of  life  came  to  its  perfection.  I  was 
delighted  and  I  did  not  know  why  until  I 
thought,  'That  is  the  way  my  people,  the 
people  I  see  in  the  mind's  eye,  play  music, 
and  I  like  it  because  it  is  all  personal,  as 
personal  as  Villon's  poetry.'  The  little 
instrument  is  quite  light,  and  the  player 
can  move  freely  and  express  a  joy  that 
is  not  of  the  fingers  and  the  mind  only  but 
of  the  whole  being ;  and  all  the  while  her 
movements  call  up  into  the  mind,  so  erect 
and  natural  she  is,  whatever  is  most  beau- 


64  DISCOVERIES 

tiful  in  her  daily  life.  Nearly  all  the  old 
instruments  were  like  that,  even  the  organ 
was  once  a  little  instrument,  and  when  it 
grew  big  our  wise  forefathers  gave  it  to 
God  in  the  cathedrals,  where  it  befits  Him 
to  be  everything.  But  if  you  sit  at  the 
piano,  it  is  the  piano,  the  mechanism,  that 
is  the  important  thing,  and  nothing  of  you 
means  anything  but  yoiu-  fingers  and  your 
intellect. 


BISCOVEBIES  65 


THE   LOOKING-GLASS 

I  HAVE  just  been  talking  to  a  girl  with 
a  shrill  monotonous  voice  and  an  abrupt 
way  of  moving.  She  is  fresh  from  school, 
where  they  have  taught  her  history  and 
geography  'whereby  a  soul  can  be  dis- 
cerned,' but  what  is  the  value  of  an  educa- 
tion, or  even  in  the  long  run  of  a  science, 
that  does  not  begin  with  the  personality, 
the  habitual  self,  and  illustrate  all  by  that  ? 
Somebody  should  have  taught  her  to 
speak  for  the  most  part  on  whatever  note 
of  her  voice  is  most  musical,  and  soften 
those  harsh  notes  by  speaking,  not  sing- 
ing, to  some  stringed  instrument,  taking 
note  after  note  and,  as  it  were,  caressing 
her  words  a  little  as  if  she  loved  the  sound 
of  them,  and  have  taught  her  after  this 
some  beautiful  pantomimic  dance,  till  it 
had  grown  a  habit  to  live  for  eye  and  ear. 
A  wise  theatre  might  make  a  training  in 


66  DISCOVERIES 

strong  and  beautiful  life  the  fashion, 
teaching  before  all  else  the  heroic  discipline 
of  the  looking-glass,  for  is  not  beauty,  even 
as  lasting  love,  one  of  the  most  difficult  of 
the  arts  ?j 


DISCOVERIES  67 


THE   TREE   OF  LIFE 

We  artists  have  taken  over-much  to 
heart  that  old  commandment  about  seek- 
ing after  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven.  Ver- 
laine  told  me  that  he  had  tried  to  translate 
^In  Memoriam/  but  could  not  because 
Tennyson  was  'too  noble,  too  Anglais, 
and,  when  he  should  have  been  broken- 
hearted, had  many  reminiscences.'  About 
that  time  I  found  in  some  English  review 
an  essay  of  his  on  Shakespeare.  'I  had 
once  a  fine  Shakespeare,'  he  wrote,  or 
some  such  words,  '  but  I  have  it  no  longer. 
I  write  from  memory.'  One  wondered  in 
what  vicissitude  he  had  sold  it,  and  for 
what  money;  and  an  image  of  the  man 
rose  in  the  imagination.  To  be  his  or- 
dinary self  as  much  as  possible,  not  a 
scholar  or  even  a  reader,  that  was  certainly 
his  pose;  and  in  the  lecture  he  gave  at 
Oxford  he  insisted  'that  the  poet  should 
hide  nothing  of  himself,'  though  he  must 
speak  it  all  with  'a  care  of  that  dignity 
which  should  manifest  itself,  if  not  in  the 


68  DISCOVERIES 

perfection  of  form,  at  all  events  with  an 
invisible,  insensible,  but  effectual  endeav- 
our after  this  lofty  and  severe  quality,  I 
was  about  to  say  this  virtue.'  It  was  this 
feeling  for  his  own  personality,  his  delight 
in  singing  his  own  life,  even  more  than 
that  life  itself,  which  made  the  generation 
I  belong  to  compare  him  to  Villon.  It 
was  not  till  after  his  death  that  I  under- 
stood the  meaning  his  words  should  have 
had  for  me,  for  while  he  lived  I  was  in- 
terested in  nothing  but  states  of  mind, 
lyrical  moments,  intellectual  essences.  I 
would  not  then  have  been  as  delighted  as 
I  am  now  by  that  guitar  player,  or  as 
shocked  as  I  am  now  by  that  girl  whose 
movements  have  grown  abrupt,  and  whose 
voice  has  grown  harsh  by  the  neglect  of 
all  but  external  activities.  I  had  not 
learned  what  sweetness,  what  rhythmic 
movement,  there  is  in  those  who  have 
become  the  joy  that  is  themselves.  With- 
out knowing  it,  I  had  come  to  care  for 
nothing  but  impersonal  beauty.  I  had 
set  out  on  life  with  the  thought  of  putting 
my  very  self  into  poetry,  and  had  under- 


DISCOVERIES  69 

stood  this  as  a  representation  of  my  own 
visions  and  an  attempt  to  cut  away  the 
non-essential,  but  as  I  imagined  the  visions 
outside  myself  my  imagination  became 
full  of  decorative  landscape  and  of  still 
life.  I  thought  of  myself  as  something 
unmoving  and  silent  living  in  the  middle 
of  my  own  mind  and  body,  a  grain  of 
sand  in  Bloomsbury  or  in  Connacht  that 
Satan's  watch  fiends  cannot  find.  Then 
one  day  I  understood  quite  suddenly,  as 
the  way  is,  that  I  was  seeking  something 
unchanging  and  unmixed  and  always  out- 
side myself,  a  Stone  or  an  Elixir  that  was 
always  out  of  reach,  and  that  I  myself  was 
the  fleeting  thing  that  held  out  its  hand. 
The  more  I  tried  to  make  my  art 
deliberately  beautiful,  the  more  did  I 
follow  the  opposite  of  myself,  for  de- 
liberate beauty  is  like  a  woman  always 
desiring  man's  desire.  Presently  I  found 
that  I  entered  into  myself  and  pictured 
myself  and  not  some  essence  when  I  was 
not  seeking  beauty  at  all,  but  merely  to 
lighten  the  mind  of  some  burden  of  love 
or  bitterness  thrown  upon  it  by  the  events 


70  DISCOVERIES 

of  life.  We  are  only  permitted  to  desire 
life,  and  all  the  rest  should  be  our  com- 
plaints or  our  praise  of  that  exacting  mis- 
tress who  can  awake  our  lips  into  song 
with  her  kisses.  But  we  must  not  give  her 
all,  we  must  deceive  her  a  little  at  times, 
for,  as  Le  Sage  says  in  Diahle  Boiteux  the 
false  lovers  who  do  not  become  melan- 
choly or  jealous  with  honest  passion  have 
the  happiest  mistresses  and  are  rewarded 
the  soonest  and  by  the  most  beautiful. 
Our  deceit  will  give  us  style,  mastery, 
that  dignity,  that  lofty  and  severe  quality 
Verlaine  spoke  of.  To  put  it  otherwise,  we 
should  ascend  out  of  common  interests,  the 
thoughts  of  the  newspapers,  of  the  market- 
place, of  men  of  science,  but  only  so  far  as 
we  can  carry  the  normal,  passionate,  reason- 
ing self,  the  personality  as  a  whole.  We 
must  find  some  place  upon  the  Tree  of  Life 
for  the  Phcenix  nest,  for  the  passion  that  is 
exaltation  and  the  negation  of  the  will,  for 
the  wings  that  are  always  upon  fire,  set  high 
that  the  forked  branches  may  keep  it  safe, 
yet  low  enough  to  be  out  of  the  little  wind- 
tossed  boughs,  the  quivering  of  the  twigs. 


DISCOVERIES  71 


THE  PRAISE  OF  OLD  WIVES'  TALES 

An  art  may  become  impersonal  because 
it  has  too  much  circumstance  or  too  httle, 
because  the  world  is  too  little  or  too  much 
with  it,  because  it  is  too  near  the  ground 
or  too  far  up  among  the  branches.  I  met 
an  old  man  out  fishing  a  year  ago,  who 
said  to  me,  'Don  Quixote  and  Odysseus 
are  always  near  to  me ' ;  that  is  true  for 
me  also,  for  even  Hamlet  and  Lear  and 
(Edipus  are  more  cloudy.^  No  play- 
wright ever  has  made  or  ever  will  make  a 
character  that  will  follow  us  out  of  the 
theatre  as  Don  Quixote  follows  us  out  of 
the  book,  for  no  playwright  can  be  wholly 
episodical,  and  when  one  constructs,  bring- 
ing one's  characters  into  complicated  re- 
lations with  one  another,  something  im- 
personal comes  into  the  story.  Society, 
fate,  'tendency,'  something  not  quite 
human,  begins  to  arrange  the  characters 
and  to  excite  into  action  only  so  much  of 

1 1  had  forgotten  Falstaff ,  who  is  an  episode  in  a 
chronicle  play. 


72  DI8C0VEBIE8 

their  humanity  as  they  find  it  necessary 
to  show  to  one  another.  The  common 
heart  will  always  love  better  the  tales  that 
have  something  of  an  old  wives'  tale  and 
that  look  upon  their  hero  from  every  side 
as  if  he  alone  were  wonderful,  as  a  child 
does  with  a  new  penny.  In  plays  of  a 
comedy  too  extravagant  to  photograph 
life,  or  written  in  verse,  the  construction 
is  of  a  necessity  woven  out  of  naked  mo- 
tives and  passions,  but  when  an  atmos- 
phere of  modern  reality  has  to  be  built  up 
as  well,  and  the  tendency,  or  fate,  or  society 
has  to  be  shown  as  it  is  about  ourselves, 
the  characters  grow  fainter,  and  we  have 
to  read  the  book  many  times  or  see  the 
play  many  times  before  we  can  remember 
them.  Even  then  they  are  only  possible 
in  a  certain  drawing-room  and  among  such 
and  such  people,  and  we  must  carry  all 
that  lumber  in  our  heads.  I  thought 
Tolstoi's  'War  and  Peace'  the  greatest 
story  I  had  ever  read,  and  yet  it  has 
gone  from  me;  even  Lancelot,  ever  a 
shadow,  is  more  visible  in  my  memory 
than  all  its  substance. 


../ 


DISCOVERIES  73 


THE   PLAY   OF   MODERN 
MANNERS 

Of  all  artistic  forms  that  have  had  a 
large  share  of  the  world's  attention,  the 
worst  is  the  play  about  modern  educated 
people.  Except  where  it  is  superficial  or 
deliberately  argumentative  it  fills  one's 
soul  with  a  sense  of  commonness  as  with 
dust.  It  has  one  mortal  ailment.  It 
cannot  become  impassioned,  that  is  to 
say,  vital,  without  making  somebody  gush- 
ing and  sentimental.  Educated  and  well- 
bred  people  do  not  wear  their  hearts  upon 
their  sleeves,  and  they  have  no  artistic 
and  charming  language  except  light  per- 
siflage and  no  powerful  language  at  all, 
and  when  they  are  deeply  moved  they 
look  silently  into  the  fireplace.  Again 
and  again  I  have  watched  some  play  of 
this  sort  with  growing  curiosity  through 
the  opening  scene.  The  minor  people 
argue,  chaff  one  another,  hint  sometimes  at 
some  deeper  stream  of  life  just  as  we  do  in 


74  DISCOVERIES 

our  houses,  and  I  am  content.  But  all 
the  time  I  have  been  wondering  why  the 
chief  character,  the  man  who  is  to  bear 
the  burden  of  fate,  is  gushing,  sentimental 
and  quite  without  ideas.  Then  the  great 
scene  comes  and  I  understand  that  he 
cannot  be  well-bred  or  self-possessed  or 
intellectual,  for  if  he  were  he  would  draw 
a  chair  to  the  fire  and  there  would  be  no 
duologue  at  the  end  of  the  third  act. 
Ibsen  understood  the  difficulty  and  made 
all  his  characters  a  little  provincial  that 
they  might  not  put  each  other  out  of 
countenance,  and  made  a  leading  article 
sort  of  poetry,  phrases  about  vine  leaves 
and  harps  in  the  air  it  was  possible  to 
believe  them  using  in  their  moments  of 
excitement,  and  if  the  play  needed  more 
than  that,  they  could  always  do  some- 
thing stupid.  They  could  go  out  and  hoist 
a  flag  as  they  do  at  the  end  of  Little  Eyolf. 
One  only  understands  that  this  manner, 
deliberately  adopted  one  doubts  not,  had 
gone  into  his  soul  and  filled  it  with  dust, 
when  one  has  noticed  that  he  could  no 
longer  create  a  man  of  genius.     The  hap- 


DISCOVERIES  75 

piest  writers  are  those  that,  knowing  this 
form  of  play  to  be  slight  and  passing,  keep 
to  the  surface,  never  showing  anything  but 
the  arguments  and  the  persiflage  of  daily 
observation,  or  now  and  then,  instead  of 
the  expression  of  passion,  a  stage  picture, 
a  man  holding  a  woman's  hand  or  sitting 
with  his  head  in  his  hands  in  dim  light 
by  the  red  glow  of  a  fire.  It  was  cer- 
tainly an  understanding  of  the  slightness 
of  the  form,  of  its  incapacity  for  the  ex- 
pression of  the  deeper  sorts  of  passion, 
that  made  the  French  invent  the  play 
with  a  thesis,  for  where  there  is  a  thesis 
people  can  grow  hot  in  argument,  almost 
the  only  kind  of  passion  that  displays  itself 
in  our  daily  life.  The  novel  of  contem- 
porary educated  life  is  upon  the  other 
hand  a  permanent  form  because  having 
the  power  of  psychological  description  it 
can  follow  the  thought  of  a  man  who  is 
iooking  into  the  grate. 


76  DISCOVERIES 


HAS    THE   DRAMA   OF   CONTEMPO- 
RARY LIFE  A  ROOT  OF   ITS  OWN? 

In  watching  a  play  about  modern  edu- 
cated people,  with  its  meagre  language 
and  its  action  crushed  into  the  narrow 
limits  of  possibility,  I  have  found  myself 
constantly  saying:  'Maybe  it  has  its 
power  to  move,  slight  as  that  is,  from 
being  able  to  suggest  fundamental  con- 
trasts and  passions  which  romantic  and 
poetical  literature  have  shown  to  be 
beautiful.'  A  man  facing  his  enemies 
alone  in  a  quarrel  over  the  purity  of  the 
water  in  a  Norwegian  Spa  and  using  no 
language  but  that  of  the  newspapers  can 
call  up  into  our  minds,  let  us  say,,  the 
passion  of  Coriolanus.  The  lovers  and 
fighters  of  old  imaginative  literature  are 
more  vivid  experiences  in  the  soul  than  any- 
thing but  one's  own  ruling  passion  that 
is  itself  riddled  by  their  thought  as  by 
lightning,  and  even  two  dumb  figures  on 
the  roads  can  call  up  all  that  glory.     Put 


DISCOVERIES  77 

the  man  who  has  no  knowledge  of  litera- 
ture before  a  play  of  this  kind  and  he  will 
say,  as  he  has  said  in  some  form  or  other 
in  every  age  at  the  first  shock  of  naturalism, 
'What  has  brought  me  out  to  hear  nothing 
but  the  words  we  use  at  home  when  we  are 
talking  of  the  rates  ? '  And  he  will  prefer 
to  it  any  play  where  there  is  visible  beauty 
or  mirth,  where  life  is  exciting,  at  high  tide 
as  it  were.  It  is  not  his  fault  that  he  will 
prefer  in  all  likelihood  a  worse  play  al- 
though its  kind  may  be  greater,  for  we  have 
been  following  the  lure  of  science  for 
generations  and  forgotten  him  and  his.  I 
come  always  back  to  this  thought.  There 
is  something  of  an  old  wives'  tale  in  fine 
literature.  The  makers  of  it  are  like  an 
old  peasant  telling  stories  of  the  great 
famine  or  the  hangings  of  '98  or  his  own 
memories.  He  has  felt  something  in  the 
depth  of  his  mind  and  he  wants  to  make 
it  as  visible  and  powerful  to  our  senses  as 
possible.  He  will  use  the  most  extrava- 
gant words  or  illustrations  if  they  suit  his 
purpose.  Or  he  will  invent  a  wild  parable, 
and  the  more  his  mind  is  on  fire  or  the 


78  BISCOVEBIES 

more  creative  it  is,  the  less  will  he  look  at 
the  outer  world  or  value  it  for  its  own  sake. 
It  gives  him  metaphors  and  examples,  and 
that  is  all.  He  is  even  a  little  scornful  of 
it,  for  it  seems  to  him  while  the  fit  is  on 
that  the  fire  has  gone  out  of  it  and  left  it 
but  white  ashes.  I  cannot  explain  it,  but 
I  am  certain  that  every  high  thing  was 
invented  in  this  way,  between  sleeping 
and  waking,  as  it  were,  and  that  peering 
and  peeping  persons  are  but  hawkers  of 
stolen  goods.  How  else  could  their  noses 
have  grown  so  ravenous  or  their  eyes  so 
sharp  ? 


DISCOVERIES  79 


WHY  THE  BLIND  MAN  IN  ANCIENT 
TIMES  WAS  MADE  A  POET 

A  DESCRIPTION  in  the  Iliad  or  the  Odys- 
sey, unhke  one  in  the  iEneid  or  in  most 
modern  writers,  is  the  swift  and  natural 
observation  of  a  man  as  he  is  shaped  by 
life.  It  is  a  refinement  of  the  primary 
hungers  and  has  the  least  possible  of  what 
is  merely  scholarly  or  exceptional.  It  is, 
above  all,  never  too  observant,  too  pro- 
fessional, and  when  the  book  is  closed  we 
have  had  our  energies  enriched,  for  we 
have  been  in  the  mid-current.  We  have 
never  seen  anything  Odysseus  could  not 
have  seen  while  his  thought  was  of  the 
Cyclops,  or  Achilles  when  Briseis  moved 
him  to  desire.  In  the  art  of  the  greatest 
periods  there  is  something  careless  and 
sudden  in  all  habitual  moods  though  not 
in  their  expression,  because  these  moods 
are  a  conflagration  of  all  the  energies  of 
active  life.  In  primitive  times  the  blind 
man  became  a  poet  as  he  became  a  fiddler 


80  BISCOVEEIES 

in  our  villages,  because  he  had  to  be  driven 
out  of  activities  all  his  nature  cried  for  be- 
fore he  could  be  contented  with  the  praise 
of  life.  And  often  it  is  Villon  or  Verlaine 
with  impediments  plain  to  all,  who  sings 
of  life  with  the  ancient  simplicity.  Poets 
of  coming  days,  when  once  more  it  will  be 
possible  to  write  as  in  the  great  epochs, 
will  recognise  that  their  sacrifice  shall  be 
to  refuse  what  bhndness  and  evil  name,  or 
imprisonment  at  the  outsetting,  denied 
to  men  who  missed  thereby  the  sting  of  a 
deliberate  refusal.  The  poets  of  the  ages 
of  silver  need  no  refusal  of  life,  the  dome  of 
many-coloured  glass  is  already  shattered 
while  they  live.  They  look  at  life  deliber- 
ately and  as  if  from  beyond  life,  and  the 
greatest  of  them  need  suffer  nothing  but 
the  sadness  that  the  saints  have  known. 
This  is  their  aim,  and  their  temptation  is 
not  a  passionate  activity,  but  the  approval 
of  their  fellows,  which  comes  to  them  in 
full  abundance  only  when  they  delight 
in  the  general  thoughts  that  hold  together 
a  cultivated  middle-class,  where  irrespon- 
sibilities of  position  and  poverty  are  lack- 


DISCOVERIES  81 

ing;  the  things  that  are  more  excellent 
among  educated  men  who  have  political 
preoccupations,  Augustus  Caesar's  affabil- 
ity, all  that  impersonal  fecundity  which 
muddies  the  intellectual  passions.  Ben 
Jonson  says  in  the  'Poetaster,'  that  even 
the  best  of  men  without  Promethean  fire 
is  but  a  hollow  statue,  and  a  studious  man 
will  commonly  forget  after  some  forty 
winters  that  of  a  certainty  Promethean 
fire  will  burn  somebody's  fingers.  It  may 
happen  that  poets  will  be  made  more  often 
by  their  sins  than  by  their  virtues,  for 
general  praise  is  unlucky,  as  the  villages 
know,  and  not  merely  as  I  imagine  —  for 
I  am  superstitious  about  these  things  — 
because  the  praise  of  all  but  an  equal  en- 
slaves and  adds  a  pound  to  the  ball  at  the 
ankle  with  every  compliment. 

All  energy  that  comes  from  the  whole 
man  is  as  irregular  as  the  lightning,  for  the 
communicable  and  forecastable  and  dis- 
coverable is  a  part  only,  a  hungry  chicken 
under  the  breast  of  the  pelican,  and  the 
test  of  poetry  is  not  in  reason  but  in  a 
delight  not  different  from  the  delight  that 


82  DISCOVERIES 

comes  to  a  man  at  the  first  coming  of  love 
into  the  heart.  I  knew  an  old  man  who 
had  spent  his  whole  life  cutting  hazel  and 
privet  from  the  paths,  and  in  some  seventy 
years  he  had  observed  little  but  had  many 
imaginations.  He  had  never  seen  like  a 
naturalist,  never  seen  things  as  they  are, 
for  his  habitual  mood  had  been  that  of  a 
man  stirred  in  his  affairs ;  and  Shake- 
speare, Tintoretto,  though  the  times  were 
running  out  when  Tintoretto  painted, 
nearly  all  the  great  men  of  the  Renais- 
sance, looked  at  the  world  with  eyes  like 
his.  Their  minds  were  never  quiescent, 
never  as  it  were  in  a  mood  for  scientific 
observations,  always  an  exaltation,  never 
—  to  use  known  words  —  founded  upon 
an  elimination  of  the  personal  factor ;  and 
their  attention  and  the  attention  of  those 
they  worked  for  dwelt  constantly  with 
what  is  present  to  the  mind  in  exaltation. 
I  am  too  modern  fully  to  enjoy  Tintoretto's 
'  Creation  of  the  Milky  Way,'  I  cannot  fix 
my  thoughts  upon  that  glowing  and  palpi- 
tating flesh  intently  enough  to  forget,  as  I 
can  the  make-believe  of  a  fairy  tale^  that 


DISCOVERIES  83 

heavy  drapery  hanging  from  a  cloud, 
though  I  find  my  pleasure  in  King  Lear 
heightened  by  the  make-believe  that  comes 
upon  it  all  when  the  fool  says:  'This 
prophecy  Merlin  shall  make,  for  I  live  be- 
fore his  time ' ;  —  and  I  always  find  it 
quite  natural,  so  little  does  logic  in  the 
mere  circumstance  matter  in  the  finest  art, 
that  Richard's  and  Richmond's  tents 
should  be  side  by  side.  I  saw  with  de- 
light The  Knight  of  the  Burning  Pestle 
when  Mr.  Carr  revived  it,  and  found  it 
none  the  worse  because  the  apprentice 
acted  a  whole  play  upon  the  spur  of  the 
moment  and  without  committing  a  line 
to  heart.  When  Ben  Jonson's  Epiccene 
rammed  a  century  of  laughter  into  the  two 
hours'  traffic,  I  found  with  amazement 
that  almost  every  journalist  had  put  logic 
on  the  seat,  where  our  lady  imagination 
should  pronounce  that  unjust  and  favour- 
ing sentence  her  woman's  heart  is  ever 
plotting,  and  had  felt  bound  to  cherish 
none  but  reasonable  sympathies  and  to 
resent  the  baiting  of  that  grotesque  old 
man.     I  have  been  looking  over  a  book  of 


84  DISCOVERIES 

engravings  made  in  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury from  those  wall-pictures  of  Hercula- 
neum  and  Pompeii  that  were,  it  seems,  the 
work  of  journeymen  copying  from  finer 
paintings,  for  the  composition  is  always  too 
good  for  the  execution.  I  find  in  great 
numbers  an  indifference  to  obvious  logic, 
to  all  that  the  eye  sees  at  common  mo- 
ments. Perseus  shows  Andromeda  the 
death  she  lived  by  in  a  pool,  and  though  the 
lovers  are  carefully  drawn  the  reflection  is 
upside  down  that  we  may  see  it  the  better. 
There  is  hardly  an  old  master  who  has  not 
made  known  to  us  in  some  like  way  how 
little  he  cares  for  what  every  fool  can  see 
and  every  knave  can  praise.  The  men  who 
imagined  the  arts  were  not  less  supersti- 
tious in  religion,  understanding  the  spirit- 
ual relations,  but  not  the  mechanical,  and 
finding  nothing  that  need  strain  the  throat 
in  those  gnats  the  floods  of  Noah  and 
Deucalion,  and  in  Joshua's  moon  at  Asca- 
lon. 


DISCOVERIES  85 


CONCERNING  SAINTS   AND 
ARTISTS 

I  TOOK  the  Indian  hemp  with  certain 
followers  of  St.  Martin  on  the  ground  floor 
of  a  house  in  the  Latin  Quarter.  I  had 
never  taken  it  before,  and  was  instructed 
by  a  boisterous  young  poet,  whose  English 
was  no  better  than  my  French.  He  gave 
me  a  little  pellet,  if  I  am  not  forgetting,  an 
hour  before  dinner,  and  another  after  we 
had  dined  together  at  some  restaurant. 
As  we  were  going  through  the  streets  to 
the  meeting-place  of  the  Martinists,  I  felt 
suddenly  that  a  cloud  I  was  looking  at 
floated  in  an  immense  space,  and  for  an 
instant  my  being  rushed  out,  as  it  seemed, 
into  that  space  with  ecstasy.  I  was  my- 
self again  immediately,  but  the  poet  was 
wholly  above  himself,  and  presently  he 
pointed  to  one  of  the  street  lamps  now 
brightening  in  the  fading  twilight,  and 
cried  at  the  top  of  his  voice,  'Why  do  you 
look  at  me  with  your  great  eye?'     There 


86  DISCOVERIES 

were  perhaps  a  dozen  people  already  much 
excited  when  we  arrived ;  and  after  I  had 
drunk  some  cups  of  coffee  and  eaten  a 
pellet  or  two  more,  I  grew  very  anxious  to 
dance,  but  did  not,  as  I  could  not  remem- 
ber any  steps.     I  sat  down  and  closed  my 
eyes;  but  no,  I  had  no  visions,  nothing 
but    a   sensation    of    some    dark    shadow 
which  seemed  to  be  telling  me  that  some 
day  I  would  go  into  a  trance  and  so  out  of 
my  body   for  a  while,   but  not    yet.     I 
opened  my  eyes  and  looked  at  some  red 
ornament  on  the  mantelpiece,  and  at  once 
the  room  was  full  of  harmonies  of  red,  but 
when  a  blue  china  figure  caught  my  eye 
the  harmonies  became  blue  upon  the  in- 
stant.    I  was  puzzled,  for  the  reds  were 
all  there,  nothing  had  changed,  but  they 
were  no  longer  important  or  harmonious; 
and  why  had  the  blues  so  unimportant  but 
a  moment  ago  become  exciting  and  de- 
lightful?   Thereupon   it  struck  me   that 
I  was  seeing  like  a  painter,  and  that  in  the 
course  of  the  evening  everyone  there  would 
change    through    every    kind    of    artistic 
perception. 


DISCOVERIES  87 

After  a  while  a  Martinist  ran  towards 
me  with  a  piece  of  paper  on  which  he  had 
drawn  a  circle  with  a  dot  in  it,  and  point- 
ing at  it  with  his  finger  he  cried  out,  '  God, 
God  ! '  Some  immeasurable  mystery  had 
been  revealed,  and  his  eyes  shone ;  and  at 
some  time  or  other  a  lean  and  shabby  man, 
with  rather  a  distinguished  face,  showed 
me  his  horoscope  and  pointed  with  an 
ecstasy  of  melancholy  at  its  evil  aspects. 
The  boisterous  poet,  who  was  an  old  eater 
of  the  Indian  hemp,  had  told  me  that  it 
took  one  three  months  growing  used  to  it, 
three  months  more  enjoying  it,  and  three 
months  being  cured  of  it.  These  men 
were  in  their  second  period;  but  I  never 
forgot  myself,  never  really  rose  above  my- 
self for  more  than  a  moment,  and  was  even 
able  to  feel  the  absurdity  of  that  gaiety, 
an  Herr  Nordau  among  the  men  of  genius, 
but  one  that  was  abashed  at  his  own  so- 
briety. The  sky  outside  was  beginning 
to  grey  when  there  came  a  knocking  at  the 
window  shutters.  Somebody  opened  the 
window,  and  a  woman  in  evening  dress,  who 
was  not  a  little  bewildered  to  find  so  many 


88  DISCOVERIES 

people,  was  helped  down  into  the  room. 
She  had  been  at  a  students'  ball  unknown 
to  her  husband,  who  was  asleep  overhead, 
and  had  thought  to  have  crept  home  un- 
observed, but  for  a  confederate  at  the  win- 
dow. All  those  talking  or  dancing  men 
laughed  in  a  dreamy  way ;  and  she,  under- 
standing that  there  was  no  judgment  in 
the  laughter  of  men  that  had  no  thought 
but  of  the  spectacle  of  the  world,  blushed, 
laughed  and  darted  through  the  room  and 
so  upstairs.  Alas  that  the  hangman's 
rope  should  be  own  brother  to  that  Indian 
happiness  that  keeps  alone,  were  it  not 
for  some  stray  cactus,  mother  of  as  many 
dreams,  immemorial  impartiality. 


DISCOVERIES  89 


THE   SUBJECT  MATTER 
OF   DRAMA 

I  READ  this  sentence  a  few  days  ago,  or 
one  like  it,  in  an  obituary  of  Ibsen :  '  Let 
nobody  again  go  back  to  the  old  ballad 
material  of  Shakespeare,  to  murders,  and 
ghosts,  for  what  interests  us  on  the  stage  is 
modern  experience  and  the  discussion  of 
our  interests ; '  and  in  another  part  of  the 
article  Ibsen  was  blamed  because  he  had 
written  of  suicides  and  in  other  ways  made 
use  of  Hhe  morbid  terror  of  death.' 
Dramatic  literature  has  for  a  long  time 
been  left  to  the  criticism  of  journalists, 
and  all  these,  the  old  stupid  ones  and  the 
new  clever  ones,  have  tried  to  impress  upon 
it  their  absorption  in  the  life  of  the  mo- 
ment, their  delight  in  obvious  originality 
and  in  obvious  logic,  their  shrinking  from 
the  ancient  and  insoluble.  The  writer  I 
have  quoted  is  much  more  than  a  journal- 
ist, but  he  has  lived  their  hurried  life,  and 
instinctively  turns  to  them  for  judgment. 


90  DISCOVERIES 

He  is  not  thinking  of  the  great  poets  and 
painters,  of  the  cloud  of  witnesses,  who  are 
there  that  we  may  become,  through  our 
understanding  of  their  minds,  spectators 
of  the  ages,  but  of  this  age.  Drama  is  a 
means  of  expression,  not  a  special  subject 
matter,  and  the  dramatist  is  as  free  to 
choose  where  he  has  a  mind  to,  as  the 
poet  of  'Endymion,'  or  as  the  painter  of 
Mary  Magdalene  at  the  door  of  Simon  the 
Pharisee.  So  far  from  the  discussion  of 
our  interests  and  the  immediate  circum- 
stance of  our  life  being  the  most  moving  to 
the  imagination,  it  is  what  is  old  and  far 
off  that  stirs  us  the  most  deeply.  There 
is  a  sentence  in  The  Marriage  of  Heaven 
and  Hell  that  is  meaningless  until  we 
understand  Blake's  system  of  correspond- 
ences. 'The  best  wine  is  the  oldest,  the 
best  water  the  newest.' 

Water  is  experience,  immediate  sensa- 
tion, and  wine  is  emotion,  and  it  is  with  the 
intellect,  as  distinguished  from  imagina- 
tion, that  we  enlarge  the  bounds  of  ex- 
perience and  separate  it  from  all  but  itself, 
from  illusion,   from  memory,   and  create 


DISCOVERIES  91 

among  other  things  science  and  good 
joumaHsm.  Emotion,  on  the  other  hand, 
grows  intoxicating  and  dehghtful  after  it 
has  been  enriched  with  the  memory  of  old 
emotions,  with  all  the  uncounted  flavours 
of  old  experience;  and  it  is  necessarily 
some  antiquity  of  thought,  emotions  that 
have  been  deepened  by  the  experiences  of 
many  men  of  genius,  that  distinguishes 
the  cultivated  man.  The  subject  matter 
of  his  meditation  and  invention  is  old,  and 
he  will  disdain  a  too  conscious  originality 
in  the  arts  as-  in  those  matters  of  daily  life 
where,  is  it  not  Balzac  who  says,  'we 
are  all  conservatives'?  He  is  above  all 
things  well-bred,  and  whether  he  write 
or  paint  will  not  desire  a  technique  that 
denies  or  obtrudes  his  long  and  noble 
descent.  Corneille  and  Racine  did  not 
deny  their  masters,  and  when  Dante 
spoke  of  his  master  Virgil  there  was  no 
crowing  of  the  cock.  In  their  day  imita- 
tion was  conscious  or  all  but  conscious, 
and  while  originality  was  but  so  much  the 
more  a  part  of  the  man  himself,  so  much 
the  deeper  because  unconscious,  no  quick 


92  DISCOVERIES 

analysis  could  find  out  their  miracle,  that 
needed,  it  may  be,  generations  to  reveal; 
but  it  is  our  imitation  that  is  unconscious 
and  that  waits  the  certainties  of  time. 
The  more  rehgious  the  subject  matter  of 
an  art,  the  more  will  it  be  as  it  were  sta- 
tionary, and  the  more  ancient  will  be  the 
emotion  that  it  arouses  and  the  circum- 
stances that  it  calls  up  before  our  eyes. 
When  in  the  Middle  Ages  the  pilgrim  to 
St.  Patrick's  Purgatory  found  himself 
on  the  lake  side,  he  found  a  boat  made 
out  of  a  hollow  tree  to  ferry  him  to  the 
cave  of  vision.  In  religious  painting  and 
poetry,  crowns  and  swords  of  an  ancient 
pattern  take  upon  themselves  new  mean- 
ings, and  it  is  impossible  to  separate  our 
idea  of  what  is  noble  from  a  mystic  stair, 
where  not  men  and  women,  but  robes, 
jewels,  incidents,  ancient  utilities  float 
upward  slowly  over  the  all  but  sleeping 
mind,  putting  on  emotional  and  spiritual 
life  as  they  ascend  until  they  are  swallowed 
up  by  some  far  glory  that  they  even  were 
too  modern  and  momentary  to  endure. 
All   art  is  dream,   and   what  the  day  is 


DISCOVERIES  93 

done  with  is  dreaming  ripe,  and  what 
art  has  moulded  rehgion  accepts,  and  in 
the  end  all  is  in  the  wine  cup,  all  is  in  the 
drunken  phantasy,  and  the  grapes  begin  to 
stammer. 


94  DISCOVERIES 


THE   TWO   KINDS   OF  ASCETICISM 

It  is  not  possible  to  separate  an  emotion 
or  a  spiritual  state  from  the  image  that 
calls  it  up  and  gives  it  expression.  Michael 
Angelo's  Moses,  Velasquez'  Philip  the 
Second,  the  colour  purple,  a  crucifix,  call 
into  life  an  emotion  or  state  that  vanishes 
with  them  because  they  are  its  only  possible 
expression,  and  that  is  why  no  mind  is  more 
valuable  than  the  images  it  contains.  The 
imaginative  writer  differs  from  the  saint 
in  that  he  identifies  himself  —  to  the  neg- 
lect of  his  own  soul,  alas !  —  with  the 
soul  of  the  world,  and  frees  himself  from 
all  that  is  impermanent  in  that  soul,  an 
ascetic  not  of  women  and  wine,  but  of  the 
newspapers.  That  which  is  permanent  in 
the  soul  of  the  world  upon  the  other  hand, 
the  great  passions  that  trouble  all  and  have 
but  a  brief  recurring  life  of  flower  and  seed 
in  any  man,  is  the  renunciation  of  the 
saint  who  seeks  not  an  eternal  art,  but  his 
own  eternity.    The  artist  stands  between 


DISCOVERIES  95 

the  saint  and  the  world  of  impermanent 
things,  and  just  in  so  far  as  his  mind  dwells 
on  what  is  impermanent  in  his  sense,  on 
all  that  'modern  experience  and  the  dis- 
cussion of  our  interests,'  that  is  to  say,  on 
what  never  recurs,  as  desire  and  hope, 
terror  and  weariness,  spring  and  autumn, 
recur  in  varying  rhythms,  will  his  mind 
become  critical,  as  distinguished  from 
creative,  and  his  emotions  wither.  He  will 
think  less  of  what  he  sees  and  more  of  his 
own  attitude  towards  it,  and  will  express 
this  attitude  by  an  essentially  critical 
selection  and  emphasis.  I  am  not  quite 
sure  of  my  memory,  but  I  think  that  Mr. 
Ricketts  has  said  in  his  book  on  the  Prado 
that  he  feels  the  critic  in  Velasquez  for  the 
first  time  in  painting,  and  we  all  feel  the 
critic  in  Whistler  and  Degas,  in  Browning, 
even  in  Mr.  Swinburne,  in  the  finest  art 
of  all  ages  but  the  greatest.  The  end  for 
art  is  the  ecstasy  awakened  by  the  presence 
before  an  ever-changing  mind  of  what  is 
permanent  in  the  world,  or  by  the  arousing 
of  that  mind  itself  into  the  very  delicate 
and  fastidious  mood  habitual  with  it  when 


96  DISCOVERIES 

it  is  seeking  those  permanent  and  recurring 
things.  There  is  a  little  of  both  ecstasies 
at  all  times,  but  at  this  time  we  have  a 
small  measure  of  the  creative  impulse 
itself,  of  the  divine  vision,  a  great  one 
of  'the  lost  traveller's  dream  under  the 
hill,'  perhaps  because  all  the  old  simple 
things  have  been  painted  or  written,  and 
they  will  only  have  meaning  for  us  again 
when  a  new  race  or  a  new  civilisation 
has  made  us  look  upon  all  with  new  eye- 
sight. 


DISCOVERIES  97 


IN  THE  SERPENT'S  MOUTH 

There  is  an  old  saying  that  God  is  a 
circle  whose  centre  is  everywhere.  If 
that  is  true,  the  saint  goes  to  the  centre, 
the  poet  and  artist  to  the  ring  where  every- 
thing comes  round  again.  The  poet  must 
not  seek  for  what  is  still  and  fixed,  for 
that  has  no  life  for  him;  and  if  he  did, 
his  style  would  become  cold  and  monoto- 
nous, and  his  sense  of  beauty  faint  and 
sickly,  as  are  both  style  and  beauty  to  my 
imagination  in  the  prose  and  poetry  of 
Newman,  but  be  content  to  find  his 
pleasure  in  all  that  is  for  ever  passing  away 
that  it  may  come  again,  in  the  beauty 
of  woman,  in  the  fragile  flowers  of  spring, 
in  momentary  heroic  passion,  in  what- 
ever is  most  fleeting,  most  impassioned, 
as  it  were,  for  its  own  perfection,  most  eager 
to  return  in  its  glory.  Yet  perhaps  he 
must  endure  the  impermanent  a  little, 
for  these  things  return,  but  not  wholly, 
for  no  two  faces  are  alike,  and,  it  may 


98  DISCOVERIES 

be,  had  we  more  learned  eyes,  no  two 
flowers.  Is  it  that  all  things  are  made 
by  the  struggle  of  the  individual  and 
the  world,  of  the  unchanging  and  the 
returning,  and  that  the  saint  and  the 
poet  are  over  all,  and  that  the  poet 
has  made  his  home  in  the  Serpent's 
mouth  ? 


DISCOVERIES  99 


THE   BLACK  AND   THE   WHITE 
ARROWS 

Instinct  creates  the  recurring  and  the 
beautiful,  all  the  winding  of  the  serpent ; 
but  reason,  the  most  ugly  man,  as  Blake 
called  it,  is  a  drawer  of  the  straight  line, 
the  maker  of  the  arbitrary  and  the  im- 
permanent, for  no  recurring  spring  will 
ever  bring  again  yesterday's  clock.  Sanc- 
tity has  its  straight  hne  also,  darting 
from  the  centre,  and  with  these  arrows 
the  many-coloured  serpent,  theme  of  all 
our  poetry,  is  maimed  and  hunted.  He 
that  finds  the  white  arrow  shall  have  wis- 
dom older  than  the  Serpent,  but  what  of 
the  black  arrow  ?  How  much  knowledge, 
how  heavy  a  quiver  of  the  crow-feathered 
ebony  rods  can  the  soul  endure  ? 


100  DISCOVERIES 


HIS   MISTRESS'S  EYEBROWS 

The  preoccupation  of  our  Art  and 
Literature  with  knowledge,  with  the  sur- 
face of  Ufe,  with  the  arbitrary,  with  mech- 
anism, has  arisen  out  of  the  root.  A 
careful  but  not  necessarily  very  subtle 
man  could  foretell  the  history  of  any 
rehgion  if  he  knew  its  first  principle, 
and  that  it  would  live  long  enough  to  fulfil 
itself.  The  mind  can  never  do  the  same 
thing  twice  over,  and  having  exhausted 
simple  beauty  and  meaning,  it  passes  to 
the  strange  and  hidden,  and  at  last  must 
find  its  delight,  having  outrun  its  har- 
monies in  the  emphatic  and  discordant. 
When  I  was  a  boy  at  the  art  school  I 
watched  an  older  student  late  returned 
from  Paris,  with  a  wonder  that  had  no 
understanding  in  it.  He  was  very  amor- 
ous, and  every  new  love  was  the  occasion 
of  a  new  picture,  and  every  new  picture 
was  uglier  than  its  forerunner.  He  was 
excited  about  his  mistress's  eyebrows,  as 


DISCOVERIES  101 

was  fitting,  but  the  interest  of  beauty  had 
been  exhausted  by  the  logical  energies  of 
Art,  which  destroys  where  it  has  rummaged, 
and  can  but  discover,  whether  it  will  or  no. 
We  cannot  discover  our  subject  matter 
by  deliberate  intellect,  for  when  a  subject 
matter  ceases  to  move  us  we  must  go  else- 
where, and  when  it  moves  us,  even  though 
it  be  'that  old  ballad  material  of  Shake- 
speare' or  even  'the  morbid  terror  of 
death,'  we  can  laugh  at  reason.  We  must 
not  ask  is  the  world  interested  in  this 
or  that,  for  nothing  is  in  question  but  our 
own  interest,  and  we  can  understand  no 
other.  Our  place  in  the  Hierarchy  is 
settled  for  us  by  our  choice  of  a  subject 
matter,  and  all  good  criticism  is  hieratic, 
delighting  in  setting  things  above  one 
another.  Epic  and  Drama  above  Lyric 
and  so  on,  and  not  merely  side  by  side. 
But  it  is  our  instinct  and  not  our  intellect 
that  chooses.  We  can  deliberately  re- 
fashion our  characters,  but  not  our  paint- 
ing or  our  poetry.  If  our  characters  also 
were  not  unconsciously  refashioned  so 
completely  by  the  unfolding  of  the  logical 


UBRAHY 
HHIVERSITY  OF  CAUFORNiA 


102  DISCOVERIES 

energies  of  Art,  that  even  simple  things 
have  in  the  end  a  new  aspect  in  our  eyes, 
the  Arts  would  not  be  among  those  things 
that  return  for  ever.  The  ballads  that 
Bishop  Percy  gathered  returned  in  the 
Ancient  Mariner  and  the  delight  in  the 
world  of  old  Greek  sculptors  sprang  into  a 
more  delicate  loveliness  in  that  archaistic 
head  of  the  young  athlete  down  the  long 
corridor  to  your  left  hand  as  you  go  into  the 
British  Museum.  Civilisation  too,  will  not 
that  also  destroy  where  it  has  loved,  until 
it  shall  bring  the  simple  and  natural  things 
again  and  a  new  Argo  with  all  the  gilding 
on  her  bows  sail  out  to  find  another  fleece  ? 


DISCOVERIES  103 


THE  TRESSES   OF  THE   HAIR 

Hafiz  cried  to  his  beloved,  'I  made  a 
bargain  with  that  brown  hair  before  the  be- 
ginning of  time,  and  it  shall  not  be  broken 
through  unending  time,'  and  it  may  be 
that  Mistress  Nature  knows  that  we  have 
lived  many  times,  and  that  whatsoever 
changes  and  winds  into  itself  belongs  to 
us.  She  covers  her  eyes  away  from  us,  but 
she  lets  us  play  with  the  tresses  of  her 
hair. 


104  DISCOVERIES 


A  TOWER   ON   THE   APENNINES 

The  other  day  I  was  walking  towards 
Urbino,  where  I  was  to  spend  the  night, 
having  crossed  the  Apennines  from  San 
Sepolcro,  and  had  come  to  a  level  place 
on  the  mountain-top  near  the  journey's 
end.  My  friends  were  in  a  carriage  some- 
where behind,  on  a  road  which  was  still 
ascending  in  great  loops,  and  I  was  alone 
amid  a  visionary,  fantastic,  impossible 
scenery.  It  was  sunset  and  the  stormy 
clouds  hung  upon  mountain  after  mountain, 
and  far  off  on  one  great  summit  a  cloud 
darker  than  the  rest  glimmered  with 
lightning.  Away  south  upon  another 
mountain  a  mediaeval  tower,  with  no  build- 
ing near  nor  any  sign  of  life,  rose  into  the 
clouds.  I  saw  suddenly  in  the  mind's  eye 
an  old  man,  erect  and  a  little  gaunt,  stand- 
ing in  the  door  of  the  tower,  while  about 
him  broke  a  windy  light.  He  was  the  poet 
who  had  at  last,  because  he  had  done  so 
much  for  the  word's  sake,  come  to  share 


DISCOVERIES  105 

in  the  dignity  of  the  saint.  He  had 
hidden  nothing  of  himself,  but  he  had 
taken  care  of  'that  dignity  .  .  .  the  per- 
fection of  form  .  .  .  this  lofty  and  severe 
quality  .  .  .  this  virtue.'  And  though  he 
had  but  sought  it  for  the  word's  sake,  or 
for  a  woman's  praise,  it  had  come  at  last 
into  his  body  and  his  mind.  Certainly 
as  he  stood  there  he  knew  how  from  behind 
that  laborious  mood,  that  pose,  that  genius, 
no  flower  of  himself  but  all  himself,  looked 
out  as  from  behind  a  mask  that  other 
Who  alone  of  all  men,  the  country-people 
say,  is  not  a  hair's  breadth  more  nor  less 
than  six  feet  high.  He  has  in  his  ears 
well-instructed  voices  and  seeming  solid 
sights  are  before  his  eyes,  and  not  as  we 
say  of  many  a  one,  speaking  in  metaphor, 
but  as  this  were  Delphi  or  Eleusis,  and  the 
substance  and  the  voice  come  to  him  among 
his  memories  which  are  of  women's  faces ; 
for  was  it  Golumbanus  or  another  that 
wrote  'There  is  one  among  the  birds  that 
is  perfect,  and  one  perfect  among  the  fish '  ? 


106  DISCOVERIES 


THE   THINKING   OF   THE  BODY 

Those  learned  men  who  are  a  terror 
to  children  and  an  ignominious  sight  in 
lovers'  eyes,  all  those  butts  of  a  traditional 
humour  where  there  is  something  of  the 
wisdom  of  peasants,  are  mathematicians, 
theologians,  lawyers,  men  of  science  of 
various  kinds.  They  have  followed  some 
abstract  reverie,  which  stirs  the  brain 
only  and  needs  that  only,  and  have  there- 
fore stood  before  the  looking-glass  with- 
out pleasure  and  never  known  those 
thoughts  that  shape  the  lines  of  the  body 
for  beauty  or  animation,  and  wake  a 
desire  for  praise  or  for  display. 

There  are  two  pictures  of  Venice  side 
by  side  in  the  house  where  I  am  writing 
this,  a  Canaletto  that  has  little  but  careful 
drawing,  and  a  not  very  emotional  pleasure 
in  clean  bright  air,  and  a  Franz  Francken, 
where  the  blue  water,  that  in  the  other 
stirs  one  so  little,  can  make  one  long  to 
plunge  into  the  green  depth  where  a  cloud 


DISCOVERIES  107 

shadow  falls.  Neither  painting  could 
move  us  at  all,  if  our  thought  did  not 
rush  out  to  the  edges  of  our  flesh,  and  it  is 
so  with  all  good  art,  whether  the  Victory 
of  Samothrace  which  reminds  the  soles  of 
our  feet  of  swiftness,  or  the  Odyssey 
that  would  send  us  out  under  the  salt  wind, 
or  the  young  horsemen  on  the  Parthenon, 
that  seem  happier  than  our  boyhood  ever 
was,  and  in  our  boyhood's  way.  Art 
bids  us  touch  and  taste  and  hear  and 
see  the  world,  and  shrinks  from  what 
Blake  calls  mathematic  form,  from  every 
abstract  thing,  from  all  that  is  of  the 
brain  only,  from  all  that  is  not  a  fountain 
jetting  from  the  entire  hopes,  memories, 
and  sensations  of  the  body.  Its  morality 
is  personal,  knows  little  of  any  general 
law,  has  no  blame  for  Little  Musgrave, 
no  care  for  Lord  Barnard's  house,  seems 
lighter  than  a  breath  and  yet  is  hard  and 
heavy,  for  if  a  man  is  not  ready  to  face 
toil  and  risk,  and  in  all  gaiety  of  heart, 
his  body  will  grow  unshapely  and  his 
heart  lack  the  wild  will  that  stirs  desire. 
It  approved  before  all  men   those   that 


108  DISCOVERIES 

talked  or  wrestled  or  tilted  under  the  walls 
of  Urbino,  or  sat  in  the  wide  window-seats 
discussing  all  things,  with  love  ever  in  their 
thought,  when  the  wise  Duchess  ordered 
all,  and  the  Lady  Emilia  gave  the  theme. 


DISCOVERIES  109 


RELIGIOUS   BELIEF   NECESSARY 
TO   RELIGIOUS   ART 

All  art  is  sensuous,  but  when  a  man 
puts  only  his  contemplative  nature  and 
his  more  vague  desires  into  his  art,  the 
sensuous  images  through  which  it  speaks 
become  broken,  fleeting,  uncertain,  or  are 
chosen  for  their  distance  from  general 
experience,  and  all  grows  unsubstantial 
and  fantastic.  When  imagination  moves 
in  a  dim  world  like  the  country  of  sleep 
in  Lovers  Nocturne  and  'Siren  there 
winds  her  dizzy  hair  and  sings,'  we  go 
to  it  for  delight  indeed  but  in  our  weariness. 
If  we  are  to  sojourn  there  that  world  must 
grow  consistent  with  itself,  emotion  must 
be  related  to  emotion  by  a  system  of  ordered 
images,  as  in  the  Divine  Comedy.  It  must 
grow  to  be  symbolic,  that  is,  for  the  soul 
can  only  achieve  a  distinct  separated  life 
where  many  related  objects  at  once  dis- 
tinguish and  arouse  its  energies  in  their 
fulness.    All  visionaries  have  entered  into 


110  DISCOVERIES 

such  a  world  in  trances,  and  all  ideal  art 
has  trance  for  warranty.  Shelley  seemed 
to  Matthew  Arnold  to  beat  his  ineffectual 
wings  in  the  void,  and  I  only  made  my 
pleasure  in  him  contented  pleasure  by 
massing  in  my  imagination  his  recurring 
images  of  towers  and  rivers,  and  caves 
with  fountains  in  them,  and  that  one 
star  of  his,  till  his  world  had  grown  solid 
underfoot  and  consistent  enough  for  the 
soul's  habitation. 

But  even  then  I  lacked  something  to 
compensate  my  imagination  for  geographi- 
cal and  historical  reality,  for  the  testimony 
of  our  ordinary  senses,  and  found  myself 
wishing  for  and  trjang  to  imagine,  as  I 
had  also  when  reading  Keats'  Endymion, 
a  crowd  of  believers  who  could  put  into 
all  those  strange  sights  the  strength  of 
their  belief  and  the  rare  testimony  of  their 
visions.  A  little  crowd  had  been  sufficient, 
and  I  would  have  had  Shelley  a  sectary 
that  his  revelation  might  have  found  the 
only  sufficient  evidence  of  religion,  miracle. 
All  symbolic  art  should  arise  out  of  a  real 
belief,  and  that  it  cannot  do  so  in  this  age 


DISCOVERIES  111 

proves  that  this  age  is  a  road  and  not  a 
resting-place  for  the  imaginative  arts. 
I  can  only  understand  others  by  myself, 
and  I  am  certain  that  there  are  many  who 
are  not  moved  as  they  desire  to  be  by 
that  solitary  light  burning  in  the  tower  of 
Prince  Athanais,  because  it  has  not  entered 
into  men's  prayers  nor  lighted  any  through 
the  sacred  dark  of  religious  contempla- 
tion. 

Lyrical  poems,  when  they  but  speak  of 
emotions  common  to  all,  require  not  indeed 
a  religious  belief  like  the  spiritual  arts,  but 
a  life  that  has  leisure  for  itself,  and  a 
society  that  is  quickly  stirred  that  our 
emotion  may  be  strengthened  by  the 
emotion  of  others.  All  circumstance  that 
makes  emotion  at  once  dignified  and  visible, 
increases  the  poet's  power,  and  I  think 
that  is  why  I  have  always  longed  for  some 
stringed  instrument,  and  a  listening  audi- 
ence, not  drawn  out  of  the  hurried  streets, 
but  from  a  life  where  it  would  be  natural  to 
murmur  over  again  the  singer's  thought. 
When  I  heard  Yvette  Guilbert  the  other 
day,  who  has  the  lyre  or  as  good,  I  was  not 


112  DISCOVERIES 

content,  for  she  sang  among  people  whose 
life  had  nothing  it  could  share  with  an 
exquisite  art,  that  should  rise  out  of  life  as 
the  blade  out  of  the  spearshaft,  a  song 
out  of  the  mood,  the  fountain  from  its 
pool,  all  art  out  of  the  body,  laughter  from 
a  happy  company.  I  longed  to  make  all 
things  over  again,  that  she  might  sing  in 
some  great  hall,  where  there  was  no  one 
that  did  not  love  life  and  speak  of  it  con- 
tinually. 


DISCOVERIES  113 


THE   HOLY  PLACES 

When  all  art  was  struck  out  of  personal- 
ity, whether  as  in  our  daily  business  or  in 
the  adventure  of  religion,  there  was  little 
separation  between  holy  and  common 
things,  and  just  as  the  arts  themselves 
passed  quickly  from  passion  to  divine  con- 
templation, from  the  conversation  of 
peasants  to  that  of  princes,  the  one  song 
remembering  the  drunken  miller  and  but 
half  forgetting  Cambuscan  bold;  so  did 
a  man  feel  himself  near  sacred  presences 
when  he  turned  his  plough  from  the  slope 
of  Cruachmaa  or  of  Olympus.  The  occu- 
pations and  the  places  known  to  Homer  or 
to  Hesiod,  those  pure  first  artists,  might,  as 
it  were,  if  but  the  fashioners'  hands  had 
loosened,  have  changed  before  the"  poem's 
end  to  symbols  and  vanished,^winged  and 
unweary,  into  the  unchanging  worlds  where 
religion  alone  can  discover  life  as  well  as 
peace.  A  man  of  that  unbroken  day  could 
have  all  the  subtlety  of  Shelley,  and  yet  use 
no   image  unknown   among  the  common 


114  DISCOVERIES 

people,  and  speak  no  thought  that  was  not  a 
deduction  from  the  common  thought.  Un- 
less the  discovery  of  legendary  knowledge 
and  the  returning  belief  in  miracle,  or  what 
we  must  needs  call  so,  can  bring  once  more 
a  new  belief  in  the  sanctity  of  common 
ploughland,  and  new  wonders  that  reward 
no  difficult  ecclesiastical  routine  but  the 
common,  wayward,  spirited  man,  we  may 
never  see  again  a  Shelley  and  a  Dickens 
in  the  one  body,  but  be  broken  to  the 
end.  We  have  grown  jealous  of  the  body, 
and  we  dress  it  in  dull  unshapely  clothes, 
that  wo  may  cherish  aspiration  alone. 
Moliere  being  but  the  master  of  common 
sense  lived  ever  in  the  common  daylight, 
but  Shakespeare  could  not,  and  Shakespeare 
seems  to  bring  us  to  the  very  market- 
place, when  we  remember  Shelley's  dizzy 
and  Landor's  calm  disdain  of  usual  daily 
things.  And  at  last  we  have  Villiers 
de  L'Isle-Adam  crying  in  the  ecstasy 
of  a  supreme  culture,  of  a  supreme 
refusal,  'as  for  living,  our  servants  will 
do  that  for  us.'  One  of  the  means  of 
loftiness,  of  marmorean  stillness  has  been 


DISCOVERIES  115 

the  choice  of  strange  and  far-away  places, 
for  the  scenery  of  art,  but  this  choice  has 
grown  bitter  to  me,  and  there  are  moments 
when  I  cannot  beheve  in  the  reahty  of 
imaginations  that  are  not  inset  with  the 
minute  hfe  of  long  familiar  things  and 
symbols  and  places.  I  have  come  to 
think  of  even  Shakespeare's  journeys  to 
Rome  or  to  Verona  as  the  outflowing  of 
an  unrest,  a  dissatisfaction  with  natural 
interests,  an  unstable  equilibrium  of  the 
whole  European  mind  that  would  not  have 
come  had  John  Palseologus  cherished,  despite 
that  high  and  heady  look,  copied  by  Burne 
Jones  for  his  Cophetua,  a  hearty  disposition 
to  fight  the  Turk.  I  am  orthodox  and  pray 
for  a  resurrection  of  the  body,  and  am  certain 
that  a  man  should  find  his  Holy  Land  where 
he  first  crept  upon  the  floor,  and  that  famil- 
iar woods  and  rivers  should  fade  into  symbol 
with  so  gradual  a  change  that  he  never  dis- 
cover, no,  not  even  in  ecstasy  itself,  that  he 
is  beyond  space,  and  that  time  alone  keeps 
him  from  Primum  Mobile,  the  Supernal 
Eden,  and  the  White  Rose  over  all. 

1906. 


POETRY  AND  TRADITION 


When  Mr.  O'Leary  died  I  could  not 
bring  myself  to  go  to  his  funeral,  though 
I  had  been  once  his  close  fellow-worker,  for 
I  shrank  from  seeing  about  his  grave  so 
many  whose  Nationalism  was  different 
from  anything  he  had  taught  or  that  I 
could  share.  He  belonged,  as  did  his  friend 
John  F.  Taylor,  to  the  romantic  concep- 
tion of  Irish  Nationality  on  which  Lionel 
Johnson  and  myself  founded,  so  far  as  it 
was  founded  on  anything  but  literature, 
our  Art  and  our  Irish  criticism.  Perhaps 
his  spirit,  if  it  can  care  for  or  can  see  old 
friends  now,  will  accept  this  apology  for 
an  absence  that  has  troubled  me.  I 
learned  much  from  him  and  much  from 
Taylor,  who  will  always  seem  to  me  the 
greatest  orator  I  have  heard ;  and  that 
ideal  Ireland,  perhaps  from  this  out  an 
imaginary  Ireland,  in  whose  service  I 
116 


POETBY  AND   TRADITION  117 

labour,  will  always  be  in  many  essentials 
their  Ireland.  They  were  the  last  to 
speak  an  understanding  of  life  and  Nation- 
ality, built  up  by  the  generation  of  Grattan, 
which  read  Homer  and  Virgil,  and  by  the 
generation  of  Davis,  which  had  been 
pierced  through  by  the  idealism  of  Maz- 
zini,^  and  of  the  European  revolutionists 
of  the  mid-century. 

O'Leary  had  joined  the  Fenian  move- 
ment with  no  hope  of  success  as  we  know, 
but  because  he  believed  such  a  movement 
good  for  the  moral  character  of  the  people ; 
and  had  taken  his  long  imprisonment 
without  complaining.  Even  to  the  very 
end,  while  often  speaking  of  his  prison  life, 
he  would  have  thought  it  took  from  his 
Roman  courage  to  describe  its  hardship. 
The  worth  of  a  man's  acts  in  the  moral 
memory,  a  continual  height  of  mind  in  the 
doing  of  them,  seemed  more  to  him  than 
their  immediate  result,  if,  indeed,  the  sight 

1  Rose  Kavanagh,  the  poet,  wrote  to  her  religious 
adviser  from,  I  think,  Leitrim,  where  she  lived,  and 
asked  him  to  get  her  the  works  of  Mazzini.  He  replied , 
'  You  must  mean  Manzone.' 


118  POETRY  AND  TRADITION 

of  many  failures  had  not  taken  away  the 
thought  of  success.  A  man  was  not  to  He, 
or  even  to  give  up  his  dignity,  on  any  pa- 
triotic plea,  and  I  have  heard  him  say,  'I 
have  but  one  religion,  the  old  Persian :  to 
bend  the  bow  and  tell  the  truth,'  and  again, 
'There  are  things  a  man  must  not  do  to 
save  a  nation,'  and  again,  'A  man  must  not 
cry  in  public  to  save  a  nation,'  and  that 
we  might  not  forget  justice  in  the  passion 
of  controversy,  'There  was  never  cause 
so  bad  that  it  has  not  been  defended  by 
good  men  for  what  seemed  to  them  good 
reasons.'  His  friend  had  a  burning  and 
brooding  imagination  that  divided  men 
not  according  to  their  achievement  but  by 
their  degrees  of  sincerity,  and  by  their 
mastery  over  a  straight  and,  to  my  thought, 
too  obvious  logic  that  seemed  to  him  essen- 
tial to  sincerity.  Neither  man  had  an 
understanding  of  style  or  of  literature  in 
the  right  sense  of  the  word,  though  both 
were  great  readers,  but  because  their  imagi- 
nation could  come  to  rest  no  place  short  of 
greatness,  they  hoped,  John  O'Leary  es- 
pecially, for  an  Irish  literature  of  the  great- 


POETRY  AND  TRADITION  119 

est  kind.  When  Lionel  Johnson  and 
Katharine  Tynan  (as  she  was  then),  and  I, 
myself,  began  to  reform  Irish  poetry,  we 
thought  to  keep  unbroken  the  thread  run- 
ning up  to  Grattan  which  John  O'Leary 
had  put  into  our  hands,  though  it  might 
be  our  business  to  explore  new  paths  of  the 
labyrinth.  We  sought  to  make  a  more 
subtle  rhythm,  a  more  organic  form,  than 
that  of  the  older  Irish  poets  who  wrote  in 
English,  but  always  to  remember  certain 
ardent  ideas  and  high  attitudes  of  mind 
which  were  the  nation  itself,  to  our  belief, 
so  far  as  a  nation  can  be  summarised  in  the 
intellect.  If  you  had  asked  an  ancient 
Spartan  what  made  Sparta  Sparta,  he 
would  have  answered.  The  Laws  of  Lycur- 
gus,  and  many  Englishmen  look  back  to 
Bunyan  and  to  Milton  as  we  did  to  Grattan 
and  to  Mitchell.  Lionel  Johnson  was  able 
to  take  up  into  his  Art  one  portion  of  this 
tradition  that  I  could  not,  for  he  had  a 
gift  of  speaking  political  thought  in  fine 
verse  that  I  have  always  lacked.  I,  on 
the  other  hand,  was  more  preoccupied  with 
Ireland  (for  he  had  other  interests),  and 


120  POETRY  AND   TRADITION 

took  from  Allingham  and  Walsh  their 
passion  for  country  spiritism,  and  from 
Ferguson  his  pleasure  in  heroic  legend,  and 
while  seeing  all  in  the  light  of  European 
literature  found  my  symbols  of  expression 
in  Ireland.  One  thought  often  possessed 
me  very  strongly.  New  from  the  influ- 
ence, mainly  the  personal  influence,  of 
William  Morris,  I  dreamed  of  enlarging 
Irish  hate,  till  we  had  come  to  hate  with  a 
passion  of  patriotism  what  Morris  and 
Ruskin  hated.  Mitchell  had  already  all 
but  poured  some  of  that  hate  drawn  from 
Carlyle,  who  had  it  of  an  earlier  and,  as 
I  think,  cruder  sort,  into  the  blood  of  Ire- 
land, and  were  we  not  a  poor  nation  with 
ancient  courage,  unblackened  fields  and 
a  barbarous  gift  of  self-sacrifice  ?  Ruskin 
and  Morris  had  spent  themselves  in  vain 
because  they  had  found  no  passion  to 
harness  to  their  thought,  but  here  was  un- 
wasted  passion  and  precedents  in  the  popu- 
lar memory  for  every  needed  thought  and 
action.  Perhaps,  too,  it  would  be  possible 
to  find  in  that  new  philosophy  of  spiritism 
coming  to  a  seeming  climax  in  the  work  of 


POETRY  AND  TRADITION  121 

Fredrick  Myers,  and  in  the  investigations 
of  uncounted  obscure  persons,  what  could 
change  the  country^  spiritism  into  a  rea- 
soned belief  that  would  put  its  might 
into  all  the  rest.  A  new  belief  seemed 
coming  that  could  be  so  simple  and  de- 
monstrable and  above  all  so  mixed  into 
the  common  scenery  of  the  world,  that  it 
would  set  the  whole  man  on  fire  and  liberate 
him  from  a  thousand  obediences  and 
complexities.  We  were  to  forge  in  Ire- 
land a  new  sword  on  our  old  traditional 
anvil  for  that  great  battle  that  must  in  the 
end  re-establish  the  old,  confident,  joyous 
world.  All  the  while  I  worked  with  this 
idea,  founding  societies  that  became 
quickly  or  slowly  everything  I  despised. 
One  part  of  me  looked  on,  mischievous  and 
mocking,  and  the  other  part  spoke  words 
which  were  more  and  more  unreal,  as  the 
attitude  of  mind  became  more  and  more 
strained  and  difficult.  Madame  Maud 
Gonne  could  still  draw  great  crowds  out 
of  the  slums  by  her  beauty  and  sincerity, 
and  speak  to  them  of  '  Mother  Ireland  with 
the  crown  of  stars  about  her  head.'    But 


122  POETRY  AND   TRADITION 

gradually  the  political  movement  she  was 
associated  with,  finding  it  hard  to  build 
up  any  fine  lasting  thing,  became  content 
to  attack  little  persons  and  little  things. 
All  movements  are  held  together  more  by 
what  they  hate  than  by  what  they  love, 
for  love  separates  and  individualises 
and  quiets,  but  the  nobler  movements, 
the  only  movements  on  which  literature 
can  found  itself,  hate  great  and  lasting 
things.  All  who  have  any  old  tradi- 
tions have  something  of  aristocracy, 
but  we  had  opposing  us  from  the  first, 
though  not  strongly  from  the  first,  a 
type  of  mind  which  had  been  without 
influence  in  the  generation  of  Grattan, 
and  almost  without  it  in  that  of  Davis, 
and  which  has  made  a  new  nation  out  of 
Ireland,  that  was  once  old  and  full  of 
memories. 

I  remember,  when  I  was  twenty  years 
old,  arguing,  on  my  way  home  from  a 
Young  Ireland  Society,  that  Ireland,  with 
its  hieratic  Church,  its  readiness  to  accept 
leadership  in  intellectual  things,  —  and 
John  O'Leary  spoke  much  of  this  readi- 


POETRY  AND   TRADITION  123 

ness,^  —  its  Latin  hatred  of  middle  paths 
and  uncompleted  arguments,  could  never 
create  a  democratic  poet  of  the  type  of 
Burns,  although  it  had  tried  to  do  so  more 
than  once,  but  that  its  genius  would  in  the 
long  run  be  aristocratic  and  lonely.  When- 
ever I  had  known  some  old  countryman, 
I  had  heard  stories  and  sayings  that  arose 
out  of  an  imagination  that  would  have 
understood  Homer  better  than  The  Cot- 
ter^s  Saturday  Night  or  Highland  Mary, 
because  it  was  an  ancient  imagination, 
where  the  sediment  had  found  the  time 
to  settle,  and  I  believe  that  the  makers  of 
deliberate  literature  could  still  take  pas- 
sion and  theme,  though  but  little  thought, 
from  such  as  he.  On  some  such  old  and 
broken  stem,  I  thought,  have  all  the  most 
beautiful  roses  been  grafted. 

1 1  have  heard  him  say  more  than  once, '  I  will  not 
say  our  people  know  good  from  bad,  but  I  wiU  say 
that  they  don't  hate  the  good  when  it  is  pointed  out 
to  them,  as  a  great  many  people  do  in  England.' 


124  POETRY  AND  TRADITION 

II 

Him  who  trembles  before  the  flame  and  the  flood, 
And  the  winds  that  blow  through  the  starry  ways; 
Let  the  starry  winds  and  the  flame  and  the  flood 
Cover  over  and  hide,  for  he  has  no  part 
With  the  proud,  majestical  multitude. 

Three  types  of  men  have  made  all 
beautiful  things.  Aristocracies  have 
made  beautiful  manners,  because  their 
place  in  the  world  puts  them  above  the 
fear  of  life,  and  the  countrymen  have  made 
beautiful  stories  and  beliefs,  because  they 
have  nothing  to  lose  and  so  do  not  fear, 
and  the  artists  have  made  all  the  rest, 
because  Providence  has  filled  them  with 
recklessness.  All  these  look  backward  to 
a  long  tradition,  for,  being  without  fear, 
they  have  held  to  whatever  pleased  them. 
The  others  being  always  anxious  have 
come  to  possess  little  that  is  good  in 
itself,  and  are  always  changing  from  thing 
to  thing,  for  whatever  they  do  or  have 
must  be  a  means  to  something  else,  and 
they  have  so  little  belief  that  anything  can 
be  an  end  in  itself,  that  they  cannot  under- 


POETRY  AND   TRADITION  125 

stand  you  if  you  say,  'All  the  most  valu- 
able things  are  useless.'  They  prefer  the 
stalk  to  the  flower,  and  believe  that  paint- 
ing and  poetry  exist  that  there  may  be  in- 
struction, and  love  that  there  may  be  chil- 
dren, and  theatres  that  busy  men  may  rest, 
and  holidays  that  busy  men  may  go  on 
being  busy.  At  all  times  they  fear  and 
even  hate  the  things  that  have  worth  in 
themselves,  for  that  worth  may  suddenly,  as 
it  were  a  fire,  consume  their  book  of  Life, 
where  the  world  is  represented  by  cyphers 
and  symbols ;  and  before  all  else,  they  fear 
irreverent  j  oy  and  unserviceable  sorrow.  It 
seems  to  them,  that  those  who  have  been 
freed  by  position,  by  poverty,  or  by  the 
traditions  of  Art,  have  something  terrible 
about  them,  a  light  that  is  unendurable  to 
eyesight.  They  complain  much  of  that 
commandment  that  we  can  do  almost  what 
we  will,  if  we  do  it  gaily,  and  think  that 
freedom  is  but  a  trifling  with  the  world. 

If  we  would  find  a  company  of  our  own 
way  of  thinking,  we  must  go  backward 
to  turreted  walls,  to  courts,  to  high  rocky 
places,  to  little  walled  towns,  to  jesters  like 


126  POETRY  AND   TRADITION 

that  jester  of  Charles  the  Fifth  who  made 
mirth  out  of  his  own  death;  to  the  Duke 
Guidobaldo  in  his  sickness,  or  Duke 
Frederick  in  his  strength,  to  all  those  who 
understood  that  life  is  not  lived,  if  not  lived 
for  contemplation  or  excitement. 

Certainly  we  could  not  delight  in  that 
so  courtly  thing,  the  poetry  of  light  love, 
if  it  were  sad ;  for  only  when  we  are  gay 
over  a  thing,  and  can  play  with  it,  do  we 
show  ourselves  its  master,  and  have  minds 
clear  enough  for  strength.  The  raging 
fire  and  the  destructive  sword  are  portions 
of  eternity,  too  great  for  the  eye  of  man, 
wrote  Blake,  and  it  is  only  before  such 
things,  before  a  love  like  that  of  Tristan 
and  Iseult,  before  noble  or  ennobled  death, 
that  the  free  mind  permits  itself  aught  but 
brief  sorrow.  That  we  may  be  free  from 
all  the  rest,  sullen  anger,  solemn  virtue, 
calculating  anxiety,  gloomy  suspicion,  pre- 
varicating hope,  we  should  be  reborn  in 
gaiety.  Because  there  is  submission  in  a 
pure  sorrow,  we  should  sorrow  alone  over 
what  is  greater  than  ourselves,  nor  too 
soon  admit  that  greatness,  but  all  that  is 


POETRY  AND  TRADITION  127 

less  than  we  are  should  stir  us  to  some  joy, 
for  pure  joy  masters  and  impregnates; 
and  so  to  world  end,  strength  shall  laugh 
and  wisdom  mourn. 

Ill 

In  life  courtesy  and  self-possession,  and 
in  the  arts  style,  are  the  sensible  impres- 
sions of  the  free  mind,  for  both  arise  out 
of  a  deliberate  shaping  of  all  things,  and 
from  never  being  swept  away,  whatever  the 
emotion,  into  confusion  or  dulness.  The 
Japanese  have  numbered  with  heroic  things 
courtesy  at  all  times  whatsoever,  and 
though  a  writer,  who  has  to  withdraw  so 
much  of  his  thought  out  of  his  life  that  he 
may  learn  his  craft,  may  find  many  his 
betters  in  daily  courtesy,  he  should  never 
be  without  style,  which  is  but  high  breed- 
ing in  words  and  in  argument.  He  is  in- 
deed the  Creator  of  the  standards  of  man- 
ners in  their  subtlety,  for  he  alone  can 
know  the  ancient  records  and  be  like  some 
mystic  courtier  who  has  stolen  the  keys 
from  the  girdle  of  time,  and  can  wander 


128  POETRY  AND  TRADITION 

where  it  please  him  amid  the  splendours 
of  ancient  courts. 

Sometimes,  it  may  be,  he  is  permitted 
the  license  of  cap  and  bell,  or  even  the 
madman's  bunch  of  straws,  but  he  never 
forgets  or  leaves  at  home  the  seal  and  the 
signature.  He  has  at  all  times  the  freedom 
of  the  well-bred,  and  being  bred  to  the 
tact  of  words  can  take  what  theme  he 
pleases,  unhke  the  Imen  drapers,  who  are 
rightly  compelled  to  be  very  strict  in  their 
conversation.  Who  should  be  free  if  he 
were  not?  for  none  other  has  a  contin- 
ual deliberate  self-delighting  happiness  — 
style,  'the  only  thing  that  is  immortal  in 
literature,'  as  Sainte-Beuve  has  said,  a 
still  unexpended  energy,  after  all  that  the 
argument  or  the  story  need,  a  still  un- 
broken pleasure  after  the  immediate  end 
has  been  accomplished  —  and  builds  this 
up  into  a  most  personal  and  wilful  fire, 
transfiguring  words  and  sounds  and  events. 
It  is  the  playing  of  strength  when  the  day's 
work  is  done,  a  secret  between  a  crafts- 
man and  his  craft,  and  is  so  inseparate  in 
his  nature,  that  he  has  it  most  of  all  amid 


POETRY  AND  TRADITION  129 

overwhelming  emotion,  and  in  the  face  of 
death.  Shakespeare's  persons,  when  the 
last  darkness  has  gathered  about  them, 
speak  out  of  an  ecstasy  that  is  one  half  the 
self-surrender  of  sorrow,  and  one  half  the 
last  playing  and  mockery  of  the  victorious 
sword,  before  the  defeated  world. 

It  is  in  the  arrangement  of  events  as  in 
the  words,  and  in  that  touch  of  extrava- 
gance, of  irony,  of  surprise,  which  is  set 
there  after  the  desire  of  logic  has  been 
satisfied  and  all  that  is  merely  necessary 
established,  and  that  leaves  one,  not  in  the 
circling  necessity,  but  caught  up  into  the 
freedom  of  self-delight:  it  is,  as  it  were,  the 
foam  upon  the  cup,  the  long  pheasant's 
feather  on  the  horse's  head,  the  spread 
peacock  over  the  pasty.  If  it  be  very 
conscious,  very  deliberate,  as  it  may  be  in 
comedy,  for  comedy  is  more  personal  than 
tragedy,  we  call  it  phantasy,  perhaps  even 
mischievous  phantasy,  recognising  how 
disturbing  it  is  to  all  that  drag  a  ball  at  the 
ankle.  This  joy,  because  it  must  be  al- 
ways making  and  mastering,  remains  in 
the  hands  and  in  the  tongue  of  the  artist. 


130  POETBY  AND  TRADITION 

but  with  his  eyes  he  enters  upon  a  sub- 
missive, sorrowful  contemplation  of  the 
great  irremediable  things,  and  he  is  known 
from  other  men  by  making  all  he  handles 
like  himself,  and  yet  by  the  unhkeness  to 
himself  of  all  that  comes  before  him  in  a 
pure  contemplation.  It  may  have  been 
his  enemy  or  his  love  or  his  cause  that  set 
him  dreaming,  and  certainly  the  phoenix 
can  but  open  her  young  wings  in  a  flaming 
nest;  but  all  hate  and  hope  vanishes  in 
the  dream,  and  if  his  mistress  brag  of  the 
song  or  his  enemy  fear  it,  it  is  not  that 
either  has  its  praise  or  blame,  but  that  the 
twigs  of  the  holy  nest  are  not  easily  set 
afire.  The  verses  may  make  his  mistress 
famous  as  Helen  or  give  a  victory  to  his 
cause,  not  because  he  has  been  either's 
servant,  but  because  men  delight  to  honour 
and  to  remember  all  that  have  served  con- 
templation. It  had  been  easier  to  fight,  to 
die  even,  for  Charles's  house  with  Marvel's 
poem  in  the  memory,  but  there  is  no  zeal 
of  service  that  had  not  been  an  impurity 
in  the  pure  soil  where  the  marvel  grew. 
Timon  of  Athens  contemplates  his  own 


POETBY  AND   TRADITION  131 

end,  and  orders  his  tomb  by  the  beachy 
margent  of  the  flood,  and  Cleopatra  sets 
the  asp  to  her  bosom,  and  their  words  move 
us  because  their  sorrow  is  not  their  own  at 
tomb  or  asp,  but  for  all  men's  fate.  That 
shaping  joy  has  kept  the  sorrow  pure,  as  it 
had  kept  it  were  the  emotion  love  or  hate,  for 
the  nobleness  of  the  Arts  is  in  the  mingling 
of  contraries,  the  extremity  of  sorrow,  the 
extremity  of  joy,  perfection  of  personality, 
the  perfection  of  its  surrender,  overflowing 
turbulent  energy,  and  marmorean  stilhiess; 
and  its  red  rose  opens  at  the  meeting  of  the 
two  beams  of  the  cross,  and  at  the  trysting- 
place  of  mortal  and  immortal,  time  and 
eternity.  No  new  man  has  ever  plucked 
that  rose,  or  found  that  trysting-place,  for 
he  could  but  come  to  the  understanding  of 
himself,  to  the  mastery  of  unlocking  words 
after  long  frequenting  of  the  great  Masters, 
hardly  without  ancestral  memory  of  the  like. 
Even  knowledge  is  not  enough,  for  the  '  reck- 
lessness' Castiglione  thought  necessary  in 
good  manners  is  necessary  in  this  likewise, 
and  if  a  man  has  it  not  he  will  be  gloomy, 
and  had  better  to  his  marketing  again. 


132  POETRY  AND  TRADITION 

IV 

When  I  saw  John  O'Leary  first,  every 
young  catholic  man  who  had  intellectual 
ambition  fed  his  imagination  with  the 
poetry  of  Young  Ireland;  and  the  verses 
of  even  the  least  known  of  its  poets  were 
expounded  with  a  devout  ardour  at  Young 
Ireland  Societies  and  the  like,  and  their 
birthdays  celebrated.  The  School  of 
writers  I  belonged  to  tried  to  found  it- 
self on  much  of  the  subject-matter  of  this 
poetry,  and,  what  was  almost  more  in  our 
thoughts,  to  begin  a  more  imaginative 
tradition  in  Irish  literature,  by  a  criticism 
at  once  remorseless  and  enthusiastic.  It 
was  our  criticism,  I  think,  that  set  Clar- 
ence Mangan  at  the  head  of  the  Young 
Ireland  poets  in  the  place  of  Davis,  and 
put  Sir  Samuel  Ferguson,  who  had  died  with 
but  little  fame  as  a  poet,  next  in  the  suc- 
cession. Our  attacks,  mine  especially,  on 
verse  which  owed  its  position  to  its  moral  or 
political  worth,  roused  a  resentment  which 
even  I  find  it  hard  to  imagine  to-day,  and 
our  verse  was  attacked  in  return,  and  not 


POETRY  AND  TRADITION  133 

for  anything  peculiar  to  ourselves,  but  for 
all  that  it  had  in  common  with  the  ac- 
cepted poetry  of  the  world,  and  most  of 
all  for  its  lack  of  rhetoric,  its  refusal  to 
preach  a  doctrine  or  to  consider  the  seem- 
ing necessities  of  a  cause.  Now,  after  so 
many  years,  I  can  see  how  natural,  how 
poetical,  even,  an  opposition  was,  that 
shows  what  large  numbers  could  not  call 
up  certain  high  feelings  without  accus- 
tomed verses,  or  believe  we  had  not 
wronged  the  feeling  when  we  did  but  at- 
tack the  verses.  I  have  just  read  in  a 
newspaper  that  Sir  Charles  Gavan  Duffy 
recited  upon  his  death  bed  his  favourite 
poem,  one  of  the  worst  of  the  patriotic 
poems  of  Young  Ireland,  and  it  has  brought 
all  this  to  mind,  for  the  opposition  to  our 
School  claimed  him  as  its  leader.  When 
I  was  at  Siena,  I  noticed  that  the  Byzan- 
tine style  persisted  in  faces  of  Madonnas 
for  several  generations  after  it  had  given 
way  to  a  more  natural  style,  in  the  less 
loved  faces  of  saints  and  martyrs.  Pas- 
sion had  grown  accustomed  to  those  slop- 
ing and  narrow  eyes,   which  are  almost 


134  POETRY  AND  TRADITION 

Japanese,  and  to  those  gaunt  cheeks,  and 
would  have  thought  it  sacrilege  to  change. 
We  would  not,  it  is  likely,  have  found 
listeners  if  John  O'Leary,  the  irreproach- 
able patriot,  had  not  supported  us.  It  was 
as  clear  to  him  that  a  writer  must  not  write 
badly,  or  ignore  the  examples  of  the  great 
masters  in  the  fancied  or  real  service  of  a 
cause,  as  it  was  that  he  must  not  lie  for  it  or 
grow  hysterical.  I  believed  in  those  days 
that  a  new  intellectual  life  would  begin, 
like  that  of  Young  Ireland,  but  more  pro- 
found and  personal,  and  that  could  we  but 
get  a  few  plain  principles  accepted,  new 
poets  and  writers  of  prose  would  make  an 
immortal  music.  I  think  I  was  more  blind 
than  Johnson,  though  I  judge  this  from 
his  poems  rather  than  anything  I  remem- 
ber of  his  talk,  for  he  never  talked  ideas, 
but,  as  was  common  with  his  generation 
in  Oxford,  facts  and  immediate  impres- 
sions from  life.  With  others  this  renun- 
ciation was  but  a  pose,  a  superficial  reac- 
tion from  the  disordered  abundance  of  the 
middle  century,  but  with  him  it  was  the 
radical  life.    He  was  in  all  a  traditionahst, 


POETRY  AND   TRADITION  135 

gathering  out  of  the  past  phrases,  moods, 
attitudes,  and  disHking  ideas  less  for  their 
uncertainty  than  because  they  made  the 
mind  itself  changing  and  restless.  He 
measured  the  Irish  tradition  by  another 
greater  than  itself,  and  was  quick  to  feel 
any  falling  asunder  of  the  two,  yet  at  many 
moments  they  seemed  but  one  in  his  im- 
agination. Ireland,  all  through  his  poem 
of  that  name,  speaks  to  him  with  the  voice 
of  the  great  poets,  and  in  Ireland  Dead 
she  is  still  mother  of  perfect  heroism,  but 
there  doubt  comes  too. 

Can  it  be  they  do  repent 
That  they  went,  thy  chivaby, 
Those  sad  ways  magnificent  ? 

And  in  Ways  of  War,  dedicated  to 
John  O'Leary,  he  dismissed  the  belief  in 
an  heroic  Ireland  as  but  a  dream. 


A  dream  !  a  dream  !  an  ancient  dream ! 
Yet  ere  peace  come  to  Innisfail, 
Some  weapons  on  some  field  must  gleam, 
Some  burning  glory  fire  the  Gael. 


136  POETRY  AND  TRADITION 

That  field  may  lie  beneath  the  sun, 
Fair  for  the  treading  of  an  host : 
That  field  in  realms  of  thought  be  won, 
And  armed  hands  do  their  uttermost : 

Some  way,  to  faithful  Innisfail, 
Shall  come  the  majesty  and  awe 
Of  martial  truth,  that  must  prevail 
To  lay  on  all  the  eternal  law. 

I  do  not  think  either  of  us  saw  that,  as 
belief  in  the  possibihty  of  armed  insur- 
rection withered,  the  old  romantic  na- 
tionalism would  wither  too,  and  that  the 
young  would  become  less  ready  to  find 
pleasure  in  whatever  they  believed  to  be 
literature.  Poetical  tragedy,  and  indeed 
all  the  more  intense  forms  of  literature, 
had  lost  their  hold  on  the  general  mass  of 
men  in  other  countries  as  life  grew  safe, 
and  the  sense  of  comedy  which  is  the 
social  bond  in  times  of  peace  as  tragic 
feeling  is  in  times  of  war,  had  become  the 
inspiration  of  popular  art.  I  always  knew 
this,  but  I  believed  that  the  memory  of 
danger,  and  the  reality  of  it  seemed  near 
enough  sometimes,  would  last  long  enough 
to   give   Ireland   her   imaginative   oppor- 


POETRY  AND   TRADITION  137 

tunity.  I  could  not  foresee  that  a  new 
class,  which  had  begun  to  rise  into  power 
under  the  shadow  of  Parnell,  would  change 
the  nature  of  the  Irish  movement,  which, 
needing  no  longer  great  sacrifices,  nor 
bringing  any  great  risk  to  individuals, 
could  do  without  exceptional  men,  and 
those  activities  of  the  mind  that  are 
founded  on  the  exceptional  moment.* 
John  O'Leary  had  spent  much  of  his 
thought  in  an  unavailing  war  with  the 
agrarian  party,  believing  it  the  root  of 
change,  but  the  fox  that  crept  into  the 
badger's  hole  did  not  come  from  there. 
Power  passed  to  small  shop-keepers,  to 
clerks,  to  that  very  class  who  had  seemed 
to  John  O'Leary  so  ready  to  bend  to  the 

1  A  small  political  organiser  told  me  once  that  he 
and  a  certain  friend  got  together  somewhere  in  Tip- 
perary  a  great  meeting  of  farmers  for  O'Leary  on  his 
coming  out  of  prison,  and  O'Leary  had  said  at  it : 
*  The  landlords  gave  us  some  few  leaders,  and  I  like 
them  for  that,  and  the  artisans  have  given  us  great 
numbers  of  good  patriots,  and  so  I  like  them  best : 
but  you  I  do  not  like  at  all,  for  you  have  never  given 
us  anyone.'  I  have  known  but  one  that  had  his 
moral  courage,  and  that  was  a  woman  with  beauty 
to  give  her  courage  and  self-possession. 


138  POETRY  AND   TRADITION 

power  of  others,  to  men  who  had  risen 
above  the  traditions  of  the  countryman, 
without  learning  those  of  cultivated  life 
or  even  educating  themselves,  and  who 
because  of  their  poverty,  their  ignorance, 
their  superstitious  piety,  are  much  sub- 
ject to  all  kinds  of  fear.  Immediate  vic- 
tory, immediate  utility,  became  every- 
thing, and  the  conviction,  which  is  in  all 
who  have  run  great  risks  for  a  cause's 
sake,  in  the  O'Learys  and  Mazzinis  as  in 
all  rich  natures,  that  life  is  greater  than 
the  cause,  withered,  and  we  artists,  who 
are  the  servants  not  of  any  cause  but  of 
mere  naked  life,  and  above  all  of  that  life 
in  its  nobler  forms,  where  joy  and  sorrow 
are  one.  Artificers  of  the  Great  Moment, 
became  as  elsewhere  in  Europe  protesting 
individual  voices.  Ireland's  great  mo- 
ment had  passed,  and  she  had  filled  no 
roomy  vessels  with  strong  sweet  wine, 
where  we  have  filled  our  porcelain  jars 
against  the  coming  winter. 

August,  1907. 


PREFACE  TO  THE  FIRST  EDITION 

OF 

JOHN   M.    SYNGE'S   POEMS   AND 
TRANSLATIONS 

*  The  Lonely  returns  to  the  Lonely,  the  Divine  to 
the  Divinity.'  —  Proclus 


While  this  work  was  passing  through 
the  press  Mr.  J.  M.  Synge  died.  Upon 
the  morning  of  his  death  one  friend  of  his 
and  mine,  though  away  in  the  country, 
felt  the  burden  of  some  heavy  event, 
without  understanding  where  or  for  whom 
it  was  to  happen;  but  upon  the  same 
morning  one  of  my  sisters  said,  'I  think 
Mr.  Synge  will  recover,  for  last  night  I 
dreamed  of  an  ancient  galley  labouring 
in  a  storm  and  he  was  in  the  galley,  and 
suddenly  I  saw  it  run  into  bright  sunlight 
and  smooth  sea,  and  I  heard  the  keel  grate 
upon  the  sand.'  The  misfortune  was  for 
139 


140  PREFACE  TO  FIRST  EDITION  OF  STNGE 

the  living  certainly,  that  must  work  on, 
perhaps  in  vain,  to  magnify  the  minds  and 
hearts  of  our  young  men,  and  not  for  the 
dead  that,  having  cast  off  the  ailing  body, 
is  now,  as  I  believe,  all  passionate  and  fiery, 
an  heroical  thing.  Our  Daimon  is  as 
dumb  as  was  that  of  Socrates,  when  they 
brought  in  the  hemlock;  and  if  we  speak 
among  ourselves,  it  is  of  the  thoughts 
that  have  no  savour  because  we  cannot  hear 
his  laughter,  of  the  work  more  difficult  be- 
cause of  the  strength  he  has  taken  with  him, 
of  the  astringent  joy  and  hardness  that  was 
in  all  he  did,  and  of  his  fame  in  the  world. 

II 

In  his  Preface  he  speaks  of  these  poems 
as  having  been  written  during  the  last 
sixteen  or  seventeen  years,  though  the 
greater  number  were  written  very  recently, 
and  many  during  his  last  illness.  An 
Epitaph  and  On  an  Anniversary  show 
how  early  the  expectation  of  death  came 
to  him,  for  they  were  made  long  ago.  But 
the  book  as  a  whole  is  a  farewell,  written 


pbeface  to  first  edition  of  synge  141 

when  life  began  to  slip  from  him.  He  was 
a  reserved  man,  and  wished  no  doubt  by 
a  vague  date  to  hide  when  still  living  what 
he  felt  and  thought,  from  those  about  him. 
I  asked  one  of  the  nurses  in  the  hospital 
where  he  died  if  he  knew  he  was  dying, 
and  she  said,  'He  may  have  known  it  for 
months,  but  he  would  not  have  spoken 
of  it  to  anyone.'  Even  the  translations 
of  poems  that  he  has  made  his  own  by 
putting  them  into  that  melancholy  dialect 
of  his,  seem  to  express  his  emotion  at  the 
memory  of  poverty  and  the  approach  of 
death.  The  whole  book  is  of  a  kind  al- 
most unknown  in  a  time  when  lyricism 
has  become  abstract  and  impersonal. 

Ill 

Now  and  then  in  history  some  man 
will  speak  a  few  simple  sentences  which 
never  die,  because  his  life  gives  them  energy 
and  meaning.  They  affect  us  as  do  the 
last  words  of  Shakespeare's  people  that 
gather  up  into  themselves  the  energy  of 
elaborate  events,  and  they  in  their  turn 


142  PREFACE  TO  FIRST  EDITION  OF  STNGE 

put  strange  meaning  into  half-forgotten 
things  and  accidents,  like  cries  that 
reveal  the  combatants  in  some  dim  battle. 
Often  a  score  of  words  will  be  enough,  as 
when  we  repeat  to  ourselves,  'I  am  a  ser- 
vant of  the  Lord  God  of  War  and  I  under- 
stand the  lovely  art  of  the  Muses,'  all  that 
remains  of  a  once  famous  Greek  poet  and 
sea  rover.  And  is  not  that  epitaph  Swift 
made  in  Latin  for  his  own  tomb  more  im- 
mortal than  his  pamphlets,  perhaps  than  his 
great  allegory  ?  '  He  has  gone  where  fierce 
indignation  will  lacerate  his  heart  no  more.' 
I  think  this  book  too  has  certain  sentences, 
fierce  or  beautiful  or  melancholy  that  will  be 
remembered  in  our  history,  having  behind 
their  passion  his  quarrel  with  ignorance, 
and  those  passionate  events,  his  books. 

But  for  the  violent  nature  that  strikes  brief 
fire  in  A  Question,  hidden  though  it  was 
under  much  courtesy  and  silence,  his  genius 
had  never  borne  those  lion  cubs  of  his.  He 
could  not  have  loved  had  he  not  hated,  nor 
honoured  had  he  not  scorned ;  though  his 
hatred  and  his  scorn  moved  him  but  seldom, 
as  I  think,  for  his  whole  nature  was  Uf ted  up 


PREFACE  TO  FIRST  EDITION  OF  STNGE  143 

into  a  vision  of  the  world,  where  hatred 
played  with  the  grotesque  and  love  became 
an  ecstatic  contemplation  of  noble  life. 

He  once  said  to  me,  'We  must  unite 
asceticism,  stoicism,  ecstasy;  two  of  these 
have  often  come  together,  but  not  all  three : ' 
and  the  strength  that  made  him  delight 
in  setting  the  hard  virtues  by  the  soft,  the 
bitter  by  the  sweet,  salt  by  mercury,  the 
stone  by  the  elixir,  gave  him  a  hunger  for 
harsh  facts,  for  ugly  surprising  things,  for 
all  that  defies  our  hope.  In  The  Passing 
of  the  Shee  he  is  repelled  by  the  contem- 
plation of  a  beauty  too  far  from  life  to 
appease  his  mood ;  and  in  his  own  work, 
benign  images  ever  present  to  his  soul  must 
have  beside  them  malignant  reality,  and  the 
greater  the  brightness,  the  greater  must  the 
darkness  be.  Though  like  'Usheen  after 
the  Fenians '  he  remembers  his  master  and 
his  friends,  he  cannot  put  from  his  mind 
coughing  and  old  age  and  the  sound  of 
the  bells.  The  old  woman  in  The  Riders 
to  the  Sea,  in  mourning  for  her  six  fine 
sons,  mourns  for  the  passing  of  all  beauty 
fiXid  strength,  while  the  drunken  woman 


144  PREFACE  TO  FIRST  EDITION  OF  SYNGE 

of  The  Tinker^ s  Wedding  is  but  the  more 
drunken  and  the  more  thieving  because  she 
can  remember  great  queens.  And  what  is 
it  but  desire  of  ardent  life,  like  that  of 
Usheen  for  his  'golden  salmon  of  the 
sea,  cleen  hawk  of  the  air,'  that  makes  the 
young  girls  of  The  Playboy  of  the  West- 
ern World  prefer  to  any  peaceful  man 
their  eyes  have  looked  upon,  a  seeming 
murderer?  Person  after  person  in  these 
laughing,  sorrowful,  heroic  plays  is,  'the 
like  of  the  little  children  do  be  listening 
to  the  stories  of  an  old  woman,  and  do  be 
dreaming  after  in  the  dark  night  it's  in 
grand  houses  of  gold  they  are,  with  speckled 
horses  to  ride,  and  do  be  waking  again  in 
a  short  while  and  they  destroyed  with  the 
cold,  and  the  thatch  dripping,  maybe,  and 
the  starved  ass  braying  in  the  yard.' 

IV 

It  was  only  at  the  last  in  his  unfinished 
Deirdre  of  the  Sorrows  that  his  mood 
changed.  He  knew  some  twelve  months 
ago  that  he  was  dying,  though  he  told  no 


PREFACE  TO  FIRST  EDITION  OF  STNGE  145 

one  about  it  but  his  betrothed,  and  he  gave 
all  his  thought  to  this  play,  that  he  might 
finish  it.  Sometimes  he  would  despond 
and  say  that  he  could  not;  and  then  his 
betrothed  would  act  it  for  him  in  his  sick 
room,  and  give  him  heart  to  write  again. 
And  now  by  a  strange  chance,  for  he  began 
the  play  before  the  last  failing  of  his  health, 
his  persons  awake  to  no  disillusionment  but 
to  death  only,  and  as  if  his  soul  already 
thirsted  for  the  fiery  fountains  there  is 
nothing  grotesque,  but  beauty  only. 


He  was  a  solitary,  undemonstrative  man, 
never  asking  pity,  nor  complaining,  nor  seek- 
ing sympathy  but  in  this  book's  momentary 
cries :  all  folded  up  in  brooding  intellect, 
knowing  nothing  of  new  books  and  news- 
papers, reading  the  great  masters  alone ;  and 
he  was  but  the  more  hated  because  he  gave 
his  country  what  it  needed,  an  unmoved 
mind  where  there  is  a  perpetual  last  day,  a 
trumpeting,  and  coming  up  to  judgment. 

April  4,  1909. 


J.  M.  SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND 
OF  HIS  TIME 


On  Saturday,  January  26th,  1907,  I 
was  lecturing  in  Aberdeen,  and  when  my 
lecture  was  over  I  was  given  a  telegram 
which  said,  'Play  great  success.'  It  had 
been  sent  from  Dublin  after  the  second  act 
of  The  Playboy  of  the  Western  World, 
then  being  performed  for  the  first  time. 
After  one  in  the  morning,  my  host  brought 
to  my  bedroom  this  second  telegram,  'Au- 
dience broke  up  in  disorder  at  the  word 
shift.'  I  knew  no  more  until  I  got  the 
Dublin  papers  on  my  way  from  Belfast 
to  Dublin  on  Tuesday  morning.  On  the 
Monday  night  no  word  of  the  play  had 
been  heard.  About  forty  young  men  had 
sat  on  the  front  seats  of  the  pit,  and 
stamped  and  shouted  and  blown  trumpets 
from  the  rise  to  the  fall  of  the  curtain. 
On  the  Tuesday  night  also  the  forty  young 
men  were  there.  They  wished  to  silence 
146 


STNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  147 

what  they  considered  a  slander  upon  Ire- 
land's womanhood.  Irish  women  would 
never  sleep  under  the  same  roof  with  a 
young  man  without  a  chaperon,  nor  ad- 
mire a  murderer,  nor  use  a  word  like 
'  shift ' ;  nor  could  anyone  recognise  the 
countrymen  and  women  of  Davis  and  Kick- 
ham  in  these  poetical,  violent,  grotesque 
persons,  who  used  the  name  of  God  so  freely, 
and  spoke  of  all  things  that  hit  their  fancy. 
A  patriotic  journalism  which  had  seen 
in  Synge's  capricious  imagination  the 
enemy  of  all  it  would  have  young  men  be- 
lieve, had  for  years  prepared  for  this 
hour,  by  that  which  is  at  once  the  greatest 
and  most  ignoble  power  of  journalism,  the 
art  of  repeating  a  name  again  and  again 
with  some  ridiculous  or  evil  association. 
The  preparation  had  begun  after  the 
first  performance  of  The  Shadow  of  the 
Glen,  Synge's  first  play,  with  an  asser- 
tion made  in  ignorance  but  repeated  in 
dishonesty,  that  he  had  taken  his  fable 
and  his  characters,  not  from  his  own  mind 
nor  that  profound  knowledge  of  cot  and 
curragh  he  was  admitted  to  possess,  but 


148   SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

'from  a  writer  of  the  Roman  decadence.' 
Some  spontaneous  dislike  had  been  but 
natural,  for  genius  like  his  can  but  slowly, 
amid  what  it  has  of  harsh  and  strange,  set 
forth  the  nobility  of  its  beauty,  and  the 
depth  of  its  compassion;  but  the  frenzy 
that  would  have  silenced  his  master-work 
was,  like  most  violent  things  artificial, 
the  defence  of  virtue  by  those  that  have  but 
little,  which  is  the  pomp  and  gallantry  of 
journalism  and  its  right  to  govern  the  world. 
As  I  stood  there  watching,  knowing  well 
that  I  saw  the  dissolution  of  a  school  of  patri- 
otism that  held  sway  over  my  youth,  Synge 
came  and  stood  beside  me,  and  said, '  A  young 
doctor  has  just  told  me  that  he  can  hardly 
keep  himself  from  jumping  on  to  a  seat, 
and  pointing  out  in  that  howling  mob  those 
whom  he  is  treating  for  venereal  disease.' 

II 

Thomas  Davis,  whose  life  had  the  moral 
simplicity  which  can  give  to  actions  the 
lasting  influence  that  style  alone  can  give 
to  words,  had  understood  that  a  country 


STNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  149 

which  has  no  national  institutions  must 
show  its  young  men  images  for  the  affec- 
tions, although  they  be  but  diagrams  of 
what  it  should  be  or  may  be.  He  and  his 
school  imagined  the  Soldier,  the  Orator, 
the  Patriot,  the  Poet,  the  Chieftain,  and 
above  all  the  Peasant ;  and  these,  as  cele- 
brated in  essay  and  songs  and  stories, 
possessed  so  many  virtues  that  no  matter 
how  England,  who,  as  Mitchell  said,  'had 
the  ear  of  the  world,'  might  slander  us, 
Ireland,  even  though  she  could  not  come 
at  the  world's  other  ear,  might  go  her  way 
unabashed.  But  ideas  and  images  which 
have  to  be  understood  and  loved  by  large 
numbers  of  people,  must  appeal  to  no  rich 
personal  experience,  no  patience  of  study, 
no  delicacy  of  sense ;  and  if  at  rare  moments 
some  Memory  of  the  Dead  can  take  its 
strength  from  one ;  at  all  other  moments 
manner  and  matter  will  be  rhetorical,  con- 
ventional, sentimental;  and  language, 
because  it  is  carried  beyond  life  perpetu- 
ally, will  be  as  wasted  as  the  thought, 
with  unmeaning  pedantries  and  silences, 
and  a  dread  of  all  that  has  salt  and  savour. 


150   SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

After  a  while,  in  a  land  that  has  given 
itself  to  agitation  over-much,  abstract 
thoughts  are  raised  up  between  men's 
minds  and  Nature,  who  never  does  the 
same  thing  twice,  or  makes  one  man  like 
another,  till  minds,  whose  patriotism  is 
perhaps  great  enough  to  carry  them  to  the 
scaffold,  cry  down  natural  impulse  with 
the  morbid  persistence  of  minds  unsettled 
by  some  fixed  idea.  They  are  preoccupied 
with  the  nation's  future,  with  heroes, 
poets,  soldiers,  painters,  armies,  fleets, 
but  only  as  these  things  are  understood 
by  a  child  in  a  national  school,  while  a 
secret  feeling  that  what  is  so  unreal  needs 
continual  defence  makes  them  bitter  and 
restless.  They  are  like  some  state  which 
has  only  paper  money,  and  seeks  by  pun- 
ishments to  make  it  buy  whatever  gol^ 
can  buy.  They  no  longer  love,  for  only 
life  is  loved,  and  at  last,  a  generation  is 
like  an  hysterical  woman  who  will  make 
unmeasured  accusations  and  believe  im- 
possible things,  because  of  some  logical 
deduction  from  a  solitary  thought  which 
has  turned  a  portion  of  her  mind  to  stone. 


STNGE  AND  TEE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  151 


III 

Even  if  what  one  defends  be  true,  an 
attitude  of  defence,  a  continual  apology, 
whatever  the  cause,  makes  the  mind  bar- 
ren because  it  kills  intellectual  innocence ; 
that  dehght  in  what  is  unforeseen,  and 
in  the  mere  spectacle  of  the  world,  the  mere 
drifting  hither  and  thither  that  must  come 
before  all  true  thought  and  emotion.  A 
zealous  Irishman,  especially  if  he  lives 
much  out  of  Ireland,  spends  his  time  in  a 
never-ending  argument  about  Oliver  Crom- 
well, the  Danes,  the  penal  laws,  the  rebel- 
lion of  1798,  the  famine,  the  Irish  peasant, 
and  ends  by  substituting  a  traditional 
casuistry  for  a  country;  and  if  he  be  a 
Catholic,  yet  another  casuistry  that  has 
professors,  schoolmasters,  letter-writing 
priests  and  the  authors  of  manuals  to 
make  the  meshes  fine,  comes  between  him 
and  Enghsh  literature,  substituting  ar- 
guments and  hesitations  for  the  excite- 
ment at  the  first  reading  of  the  great  poets 
which  should  be  a  sort  of  violent  imagina- 


162   SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

tive  puberty.  His  hesitations  and  argu- 
ments may  have  been  right,  the  CathoHc 
philosophy  may  be  more  profound  than 
Milton's  morality,  or  Shelley's  vehement 
vision;  but  none  the  less  do  we  lose  life 
by  losing  that  recklessness  Castiglione 
thought  necessary  even  in  good  manners, 
and  offend  our  Lady  Truth,  who  would 
never,  had  she  desired  an  anxious  court- 
ship, have  digged  a  well  to  be  her  parlour. 
I  admired,  though  we  were  always  quar- 
relling, J.  F.  Taylor,  the  orator,  who  died 
just  before  the  first  controversy  over  these 
plays.  It  often  seemed  to  me  that  when 
he  spoke  Ireland  herself  had  spoken,  one 
got  that  sense  of  surprise  that  comes  when 
a  man  has  said  what  is  unforeseen  because 
it  is  far  from  the  common  thought,  and  yet 
obvious  because  when  it  has  been  spoken, 
the  gate  of  the  mind  seems  suddenly  to  roll 
back  and  reveal  forgotten  sights  and  let 
loose  lost  passions.  I  have  never  heard 
him  speak  except  in  some  Irish  literary  or 
political  society,  but  there  at  any  rate,  as 
in  conversation,  I  found  a  man  whose  life 
was  a  ceaseless  reverie  over  the  religious 


SYNGEANB  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  153 

and  political  history  of  Ireland.  He  saw 
himself  pleading  for  his  country  before  an 
invisible  jury,  perhaps  of  the  great  dead, 
against  traitors  at  home  and  enemies 
abroad,  and  a  sort  of  frenzy  in  his  voice 
and  the  moral  elevation  of  his  thoughts 
gave  him  for  the  moment  style  and  music. 
One  asked  oneself  again  and  again,  'Why 
is  not  this  man  an  artist,  a  man  of  genius, 
a  creator  of  some  kind?'  The  other  day 
under  the  influence  of  memory,  I  read 
through  his  one  book,  a  life  of  Owen  Roe 
O'Neill,  and  found  there  no  sentence  de- 
tachable from  its  context  because  of  wis- 
dom or  beauty.  Everything  was  argued 
from  a  premise;  and  wisdom  and  style, 
whether  in  life  or  letters,  come  from  the 
presence  of  what  is  self-evident,  from  that 
which  requires  but  statement,  from  what 
Blake  called  'naked  beauty  displayed.' 
The  sense  of  what  was  unforeseen  and 
obvious,  the  rolling  backward  of  the  gates, 
had  gone  with  the  living  voice,  with  the 
nobility  of  will  that  made  one  understand 
what  he  saw  and  felt  in  what  was  now 
but  argument  and  logic.     I  found  myself 


154   SYNGEAND  THE  IBELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

in  the  presence  of  a  mind  like  some  noisy 
and  powerful  machine,  of  thought  that  was 
no  part  of  wisdom  but  the  apologetic  of  a 
moment,  a  woven  thing,  no  intricacy  of 
leaf  and  twig,  of  words  with  no  more  of 
salt  and  of  savour  than  those  of  a  Jesuit 
professor  of  literature,  or  of  any  other  who 
does  not  know  that  there  is  no  lasting 
writing  which  does  not  define  the  quality, 
or  carry  the  substance  of  some  pleasure. 
How  can  one,  if  one's  mind  be  full  of  ab- 
stractions and  images  created  not  for  their 
own  sake  but  for  the  sake  of  party,  even 
if  there  were  still  the  need,  make  pictures 
for  the  mind's  eye  and  sounds  that  delight 
the  ear,  or  discover  thoughts  that  tighten 
the  muscles,  or  quiver  and  tingle  in  the 
flesh,  and  so  stand  like  St.  Michael  with 
the  trumpet  that  calls  the  body  to  resur- 
rection ? 

IV 

Young  Ireland  had  taught  a  study  of 
our  history  with  the  glory  of  Ireland  for 
event,  and  this  for  lack,  when  less   than 


SYNGEANB  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  155 

Taylor  studied,  of  comparison  with  that 
of  other  countries  wrecked  the  historical 
instinct.  An  old  man  with  an  academic 
appointment,  who  was  a  leader  in  the 
attack  upon  Synge  sees  in  the  eleventh 
century  romance  of  Deirdre  a  retelling  of 
the  first  five-act  tragedy  outside  the  classic 
languages,  and  this  tragedy  from  his  de- 
scription of  it  was  certainly  written  on  the 
Elizabethan  model ;  while  an  allusion  to  a 
copper  boat,  a  marvel  of  magic  like  Cin- 
derella's slipper,  persuades  him  that  the 
ancient  Irish  had  forestalled  the  modern 
dockyards  in  the  making  of  metal  ships. 
The  man  who  doubted,  let  us  say,  our 
fabulous  ancient  kings  running  up  to 
Adam,  or  found  but  mythology  in  some 
old  tale,  was  as  hated  as  if  he  had  doubted 
the  authority  of  Scripture.  Above  all  no 
man  was  so  ignorant,  that  he  had  not  by 
rote  familiar  arguments  and  statistics  to 
drive  away  amid  familiar  applause  all 
those  had  they  but  found  strange  truth 
in  the  world  or  in  their  mind,  whose  know- 
ledge has  passed  out  of  memory  and 
become  an  instinct  of  hand  or  eye.    There 


156   SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

was  no  literature,  for  literature  is  a  child 
of  experience  always,  of  knowledge  never ; 
and  the  nation  itself,  instead  of  being  a 
dumb  struggling  thought  seeking  a  mouth 
to  utter  it  or  hand  to  show  it,  a  teeming 
delight  that  would  re-create  the  world, 
had  become,  at  best,  a  subject  of  know- 
ledge. 


Taylor  always  spoke  with  confidence, 
though  he  was  no  determined  man,  being 
easily  flattered  or  jostled  from  his  way; 
and  this,  putting  as  it  were  his  fiery  heart 
into  his  mouth,  made  him  formidable.  And 
I  have  noticed  that  all  those  who  speak  the 
thoughts  of  many,  speak  confidently, 
while  those  who  speak  their  own  thoughts 
are  hesitating  and  timid,  as  though  they 
spoke  out  of  a  mind  and  body  grown  sen- 
sitive to  the  edge  of  bewilderment  among 
many  impressions.  They  speak  to  us 
that  we  may  give  them  certainty,  by  see- 
ing what  they  have  seen;  and  so  it  is, 
that  enlargement  of  experience  does  not 


STNGE  AND  TEE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  157 

come  from  those  oratorical  thinkers,  or 
from  those  decisive  rhythms  that  move 
large  numbers  of  men,  but  from  writers 
that  seem  by  contrast  as  feminine  as  the 
soul  when  it  explores  in  Blake's  picture 
the  recesses  of  the  grave,  carrying  its  faint 
lamp  trembling  and  astonished ;  or  as  the 
Muses  who  are  never  pictured  as  one- 
breasted  Amazons,  but  as  women  needing 
protection.  Indeed,  all  art  which  appeals  to 
individual  man  and  awaits  the  confirma- 
tion of  his  senses  and  his  reveries,  seems 
when  arrayed  against  the  moral  zeal,  the 
confident  logic,  the  ordered  proof  of  jour- 
nalism, a  trifling,  impertinent,  vexatious 
thing,  a  tumbler  who  has  unrolled  his 
carpet  in  the  way  of  a  marching  army. 

VI 

I  attack  things  that  are  as  dear  to  many 
as  some  holy  image  carried  hither  and 
thither  by  some  broken  clan,  and  can  but 
say  that  I  have  felt  in  my  body  the  affec- 
tions I  disturb,  and  believed  that  if  I 
could   raise   them   into   contemplation   I 


158   SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

would  make  possible  a  literature,  that, 
finding  its  subject-matter  all  ready  in 
men's  minds,  would  be,  not  as  ours  is,  an 
interest  for  scholars,  but  the  possession  of  a 
people.  I  have  founded  societies  with  this 
aim,  and  was  indeed  founding  one  in 
Paris  when  I  first  met  with  J.  M.  Synge, 
and  I  have  known  what  it  is  to  be  changed 
by  that  I  would  have  changed,  till  I 
became  argumentative  and  unmannerly, 
hating  men  even  in  daily  life  for  their 
opinions.  And  though  I  was  never  con- 
vinced that  the  anatomies  of  last  year's 
leaves  are  a  living  forest,  nor  thought  a 
continual  apologetic  could  do  other  than 
make  the  soul  a  vapour  and  the  body  a 
stone ;  nor  believed  that  literature  can  be 
made  by  anything  but  by  what  is  still 
blind  and  dumb  within  ourselves,  I  have 
had  to  learn  how  hard  in  one  who  lives 
where  forms  of  expression  and  habits  of 
thought  have  been  born,  not  for  the 
pleasure  of  begetting  but  for  the  public 
good,  is  that  purification  from  insincerity, 
vanity,  malignity,  arrogance,  which  is  the 
discovery  of  style.    But  it  became  possible 


STNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  159 

to  live  when  I  had  learnt  all  I  had  not 
learnt  in  shaping  words,  in  defending 
Synge  against  his  enemies,  and  knew 
that  rich  energies,  fine,  turbulent  or  gra- 
cious thoughts,  whether  in  life  or  letters, 
are  but  love-children. 

Synge  seemed  by  nature  unfitted  to 
think  a  political  thought,  and  with  the 
exception  of  one  sentence,  spoken  when  I 
first  met  him  in  Paris,  that  imphedsome 
sort  of  nationalist  conviction,  I  cannot  re- 
member that  he  spoke  of  politics  or  showed 
any  interest  in  men  in  the  mass,  or  in  any 
subject  that  is  studied  through  abstractions 
and  statistics.  Often  for  months  together 
he  and  I  and  Lady  Gregory  would  see  no 
one  outside  the  Abbey  Theatre,  and  that 
life,  lived  as  it  were  in  a  ship  at  sea,  suited 
him,  for  unlike  those  whose  habit  of  mind 
fits  them  to  judge  of  men  in  the  mass,  he 
was  wise  in  judging  individual  men,  and  as 
wise  in  dealing  with  them  as  the  faint 
energies  of  ill-health  would  permit ;  but  of 
their  political  thoughts  he  long  understood 
nothing.  One  night  when  we  were  still 
producing  plays  in  a  little  hall,   certain 


160   STNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

members  of  the  Company  told  him  that 
a  play  on  the  Rebellion  of  '98  would  be  a 
great  success.  After  a  fortnight  he  brought 
them  a  scenario  which  read  like  a  chapter 
out  of  Rabelais.  Two  women,  a  Protes- 
tant and  a  Catholic,  take  refuge  in  a  cave, 
and  there  quarrel  about  religion,  abusing 
the  Pope  or  Queen  Elizabeth  and  Henry 
VIII,  but  in  low  voices,  for  the  one  fears  to 
be  ravished  by  the  soldiers,  the  other  by 
the  rebels.  At  last  one  woman  goes  out 
because  she  would  sooner  any  fate  than 
such  wicked  company.  Yet,  I  doubt  if 
he  would  have  written  at  all  if  he  did  not 
write  of  Ireland,  and  for  it,  and  I  know  that 
he  thought  creative  art  could  only  come 
from  such  preoccupation.  Once,  when 
in  later  years,  anxious  about  the  edu- 
cational effect  of  our  movement,  I  pro- 
posed adding  to  the  Abbey  Company  a 
second  Company  to  play  international 
drama,  Synge,  who  had  not  hitherto 
opposed  me,  thought  the  matter  so  im- 
portant that  he  did  so  in  a  formal  letter. 

I  had  spoken  of  a  German  municipal 
theatre  as  my  model,  and  he  said  that  the 


STNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  161 

municipal  theatres  all  over  Europe  gave 
fine  performances  of  old  classics,  but  did 
not  create  (he  disliked  modern  drama  for 
its  sterility  of  speech,  and  perhaps  ignored 
it),  and  that  we  would  create  nothing  if  we 
did  not  give  all  our  thoughts  to  Ireland 
Yet  in  Ireland  he  loved  only  what  was 
wild  in  its  people,  and  in  'the  grey  and 
wintry  sides  of  many  glens.'  All  the 
rest,  all  that  one  reasoned  over,  fought  for, 
read  of  in  leading  articles,  all  that  came 
from  education,  all  that  came  down  from 
Young  Ireland  —  though  for  this  he  had 
not  lacked  a  Httle  sympathy  —  first 
wakened  in  him  perhaps  that  irony  which 
runs  through  all  he  wrote,  but  once  awak- 
ened, he  made  it  turn  its  face  upon  the 
whole  of  life.  The  women  quarrelling  in 
1  the  cave  would  not  have  amused  him,  if 
'  something  in  his  nature  had  not  looked 
out  on  most  disputes,  even  those  wherein 
he  himself  took  sides,  with  a  mischievous 
wisdom.  He  told  me  once  that  when  he 
lived  in  some  peasant's  house,  he  tried  to 
make  those  about  him  forget  that  he  was 
there,  and  it  is  certain  that  he  was  silent  in 


162    STNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

any  crowded  room.  It  is  possible  that 
low  vitality  helped  him  to  be  observant 
and  contemplative,  and  made  him  dislike, 
even  in  solitude,  those  thoughts  which 
unite  us  to  others,  much  as  we  all  dislike, 
when  fatigue  or  illness  has  sharpened  the 
nerves,  hoardings  covered  with  advertise- 
ments, the  fronts  of  big  theatres,  big 
London  hotels,  and  all  architecture  which 
has  been  made  to  impress  the  crowd. 
What  blindness  did  for  Homer,  lameness 
for  Hephsestus,  asceticism  for  any  saint 
you  will,  bad  health  did  for  him  by  making 
him  ask  no  more  of  hfe  than  that  it  should 
keep  him  living,  and  above  all  perhaps  by 
concentrating  his  imagination  upon  one 
thought,  health  itself.  I  think  that  all 
noble  things  are  the  result  of  warfare; 
great  nations  and  classes,  of  warfare  in 
the  visible  world,  great  poetry  and  philos- 
ophy, of  invisible  warfare,  the  division  of 
a  mind  within  itself,  a  victory,  the  sacrifice 
of  a  man  to  himself.  I  am  certain  that 
my  friend's  noble  art,  so  full  of  passion 
and  heroic  beauty,  is  the  victory  of  a  man 
who  in  poverty  and  sickness  created  from 


SYNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME   163 

the  delight  of  expression,  and  in  the 
contemplation  that  is  born  of  the  minute 
and  delicate  arrangement  of  images,  happi- 
ness, and  health  of  mind.  Some  early 
poems  have  a  morbid  melancholy,  and  he 
himself  spoke  of  early  work  he  had  de- 
stroyed as  morbid,  for  as  yet  the  crafts- 
manship was  not  fine  enough  to  bring  the 
artist's  joy  which  is  of  one  substance  with 
that  of  sanctity.  In  one  poem  he  waits  at 
some  street  corner  for  a  friend,  a  woman 
perhaps,  and  while  he  waits  and  gradually 
understands  that  nobody  is  coming,  sees 
two  funerals  and  shivers  at  the  future ; 
and  in  another  written  on  his  twenty-fifth 
birthday,  he  wonders  if  the  twenty-five 
years  to  come  shall  be  as  evil  as  those  gone 
by.  Later  on,  he  can  see  himself  as  but  a 
part  of  the  spectacle  of  the  world  and  mix 
into  all  he  sees  that  flavour  of  extrava- 
gance, or  of  humour,  or  of  philosophy, 
that  makes  one  understand  that  he  con- 
templates even  his  own  death  as  if  it  were 
another's  and  finds  in  his  own  destiny  but 
as  it  were  a  projection  through  a  burning 
glass  of  that  general  to  men.    There  is  in 


164    STNGEANB  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

the  creative  joy  an  acceptance  of  what  life 
brings,  because  we  have  understood  the 
beauty  of  what  it  brings,  or  a  hatred  of 
death  for  what  it  takes  away,  which 
arouses  within  us,  through  some  sympathy 
perhaps  with  all  other  men,  an  energy  so 
noble,  so  powerful,  that  we  laugh  aloud  and 
mock,  in  the  terror  or  the  sweetness  of  our 
exaltation,  at  death  and  oblivion. 

In  no  modern  writer  that  has  written 
of  Irish  life  before  him,  except  it  may 
be  Miss  Edgeworth  in  Castle  Rackrent, 
was  there  anything  to  change  a  man's 
thought  about  the  world  or  stir  his  moral 
nature,  for  they  but  play  with  pictures, 
persons  and  events,  that  whether  well  or 
ill  observed  are  but  an  amusement  for  the 
mind  where  it  escapes  from  meditation, 
a  child's  show  that  makes  the  fables  of 
his  art  as  significant  by  contrast  as  some 
procession  painted  on  an  Egyptian  wall; 
for  in  these  fables,  an  intelligence,  on 
which  the  tragedy  of  the  world  had  been 
thrust  in  so  few  years,  that  Life  had  no 
time  to  brew  her  sleepy  drug,  has  spoken  of 
the  moods  that  are  the  expression  of  its 


SYNGEANB  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  165 

wisdom.  All  minds  that  have  a  wisdom 
come  of  tragic  reality  seem  morbid  to 
those  that  are  accustomed  to  writers  who 
have  not  faced  reality  at  all ;  just  as 
the  saints,  with  that  Obscure  Night  of  the 
Soul,  which  fell  so  certainly  that  they 
,  numbered  it  among  spiritual  states,  one 
I  among  other  ascending  steps,  seem  morbid 
to  the  rationalist  and  the  old-fashioned 
Protestant  controversialist.  The  thought 
of  journalists,  like  that  of  the  Irish  novel- 
ists, is  neither  healthy  nor  unhealthy,  for 
it  has  not  risen  to  that  state  where  either 
is  possible,  nor  should  we  call  it  happy; 
for  who  would  have  sought  happiness,  if 
happiness  were  not  the  supreme  attain- 
ment of  man,  in  heroic  toils,  in  the  cell  of 
the  ascetic,  or  imagined  it  above  the 
cheerful  newspapers,  above  the  clouds  ? 

VII  * 

Not  that  Synge  brought  out  of  the 
struggle  with  himself  any  definite  philos- 
ophy, for  philosophy  in  the  common  mean- 
ing of  the  word  is  created  out  of  an  anxiety 


166   STNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

for  sympathy  or  obedience,  and  he  was  that 
rare,  that  distinguished,  that  most  noble 
thing,  which  of  all  things  still  of  the 
world  is  nearest  to  being  sufficient  to 
itself,  the  pure  artist.  Sir  Philip  Sid- 
ney complains  of  those  who  could  hear 
'sweet  tunes'  (by  which  he  understands 
could  look  upon  his  lady)  and  not  be 
stirred  to  'ravishing  delight.' 

'Or  if  they  do  delight  therein,  yet  are  so  closed  with 

wit, 
As  with  sententious  hps  to  set  a  title  vain  on  it ; 
Oh  let  them  hear  these  sacred  tunes,  and  learn  in 

Wonder's  schools 
To  be,  in  things  past  bonds  of  wit,  fools  if  they  be 

not  fools ! ' 

Ireland  for  three  generations  has  been 
like  those  churlish  logicians.  Every- 
thing is  argued  over,  everything  has  to 
take  its  trial  before  the  dull  sense  and  the 
hasty  judgment,  and  the  character  of 
the  nation  has  so  changed  that  it  hardly 
keeps  but  among  country  people,  or 
where  some  family  tradition  is  still  stub- 
born, those  lineaments  that  made  Borrow 
cry  out  as  he  came  from  among  the  Irish 


8TNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  1G7 

monks,  his  friends  and  entertainers  for  all 
his  Spanish  Bible  scattering,  'Oh,  Ireland, 
mother  of  the  bravest  soldiers  and  of  the 
most  beautiful  women ! '  It  was,  as  I 
believe,  to  seek  that  old  Ireland  which 
took  its  mould  from  the  duellists  and 
scholars  of  the  eighteenth  century  and 
from  generations  older  still,  that  Synge  re- 
turned again  and  again  to  Aran,  to  Kerry, 
and  to  the  wild  Blaskets. 

VIII 

'When  I  got  up  this  morning, '  he  writes, 
after  he  had  been  a  long  time  in  Innismaan, 
'I  found  that  the  people  had  gone  to 
Mass  and  latched  the  kitchen  door  from  the 
outside,  so  that  I  could  not  open  it  to  give 
myself  light. 

'I  sat  for  nearly  an  hour  beside  the  fire 
with  a  curious  feeling  that  I  should  be 
quite  alone  in  this  little  cottage.  I  am 
so  used  to  sitting  here  with  the  people  that 
I  have  never  felt  the  room  before  as  a 
place  where  any  man  might  live  and  work 
by  himself.    After  a  while  as  I  waited, 


168   STNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

with  just  light  enough  from  the  chimney 
to  let  me  see  the  rafters  and  the  greyness 
of  the  walls,  I  became  indescribably 
mournful,  for  I  felt  that  this  little  corner 
on  the  face  of  the  world,  and  the  people 
who  live  in  it,  have  a  peace  and  dignity 
from  which  we  are  shut  for  ever.'  This 
life,  which  he  describes  elsewhere  as  the 
most  primitive  left  in  Europe,  satisfied 
some  necessity  of  his  nature.  Before 
I  met  him  in  Paris  he  had  wandered  over 
much  of  Europe,  listening  to  stories  in 
the  Black  Forest,  making  friends  with 
servants  and  with  poor  people,  and  this 
from  an  aesthetic  interest,  for  he  had 
gathered  no  statistics,  had  no  money  to 
give,  and  cared  nothing  for  the  wrongs  of 
the  poor,  being  content  to  pay  for  the 
pleasure  of  eye  and  ear  with  a  tune  upon 
the  fiddle.  He  did  not  love  them  the 
better  because  they  were  poor  and  miser- 
able, and  it  was  only  when  he  found  In- 
nismaan  and  the  Blaskets,  where  there  is 
neither  riches  nor  poverty,  neither  what 
he  calls  'the  nuUity  of  the  rich'  nor  'the 
squalor  of  the  poor'  that  his  writing  lost 


SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  169 

its  old  morbid  brooding,  that  he  found 
his  genius  and  his  peace.  Here  were 
men  and  women  who  under  the  weight 
of  their  necessity  Hved,  as  the  artist 
lives,  in  the  presence  of  death  and  child- 
hood, and  the  great  affections  and  the 
orgiastic  moment  when  life  outleaps  its 
limits,  and  who,  as  it  is  always  with 
those  who  have  refused  or  escaped  the 
trivial  and  the  temporary,  had  dignity  and 
good  manners  where  manners  mattered. 
Here  above  all  was  silence  from  all  our 
great  orator  took  delight  in,  from  formi- 
dable men,  from  moral  indignation,  from 
the  'sciolist'  who  'is  never  sad,'  from  all 
in  modern  life  that  would  destroy  the 
arts;  and  here,  to  take  a  thought  from 
another  playwright  of  our  school,  he 
could  love  Time  as  only  women  and 
great  artists  do  and  need  never  sell  it. 

IX 

As  I  read  The  Aran  Islands  right 
through  for  the  first  time  since  he  showed 
it  me  in  manuscript,  I  come  to  understand 


170  STNGEANB  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

how  much   knowledge    of    the    real    Hfe 
of    Ireland    went   to    the    creation   of    a 
world   which   is  yet  as  fantastic   as  the 
Spain  of   Cervantes.     Here    is   the  story 
of    The   Playboy,  of  The    Shadow    of    the 
Glen;    here    is    the  ghost    on    horseback 
and  the  finding  of  the  young  man's  body 
of    Riders  to    the    Sea,   numberless  ways 
of  speech  and  vehement  pictures  that  had 
seemed   to   owe   nothing   to   observation, 
and  all  to  some  overflowing  of  himself,  or 
to  some  mere  necessity  of  dramatic  con- 
struction.    I    had    thought    the    violent 
quarrels  of  The   Well   of  the  Saints  came 
from  his  love  of  bitter  condiments,  but 
here  is  a  couple  that  quarrel  all  day  long 
amid  neighbours  who  gather  as  for  a  play. 
I  had  defended  the  burning  of  Christy 
Mahon's  leg  on  the  ground  that  an  artist 
need  but  make  his  characters  self-consist- 
ent, and  yet,  that  too  was  observation, 
for    'although    these    people    are    kindly 
towards   each   other   and   their   children, 
they  have  no  sympathy  for  the  suffering 
of  animals,  and  Uttle  sympathy  for  pain 
when  the  person  who  feels  it  is  not  in 


SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  171 

danger.'  I  had  thought  it  was  in  the 
wantonness  of  fancy  Martin  Dhoul  accused 
the  smith  of  plucking  liis  living  ducks,  but 
a  few  lines  farther  on,  in  this  book  where 
moral  indignation  is  unknown,  I  read, 
'Sometimes  when  I  go  into  a  cottage,  I 
find  all  the  women  of  the  place  down  on 
their  knees  plucking  the  feathers  from 
live  ducks  and  geese.' 

He  loves  all  that  has  edge,  all  that  is 
salt  in  the  mouth,  all  that  is  rough  to  the 
hand,  all  that  heightens  the  emotions 
by  contest,  all  that  stings  into  life  the 
sense  of  tragedy ;  and  in  this  book,  unlike 
the  plays  where  nearness  to  his  audience 
moves  him  to  mischief,  he  shows  it  without 
thought  of  other  taste  than  his.  It  is  so 
constant,  it  is  all  set  out  so  simply,  so  nat- 
urally, that  it  suggests  a  correspondence 
between  a  lasting  mood  of  the  soul  and 
this  life  that  shares  the  harshness  of  rocks 
and  wind.  The  food  of  the  spiritual- 
minded  is  sweet,  an  Indian  scripture  says, 
but  passionate  minds  love  bitter  food. 
Yet  he  is  no  indifferent  observer,  but  is 
certainly    kind    and    sympathetic    to    all 


172  STNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

about  him.  When  an  old  and  aihng  man, 
dreading  the  coming  winter,  cries  at  his 
leaving,  not  thinking  to  see  him  again; 
and  he  notices  that  the  old  man's  mitten 
has  a  hole  in  it  where  the  palm  is  accus- 
tomed to  the  stick,  one  knows  that  it  is 
with  eyes  full  of  interested  affection  as 
befits  a  simple  man  and  not  in  the  curiosity 
of  study.  When  he  had  left  the  Blaskets 
for  the  last  time,  he  travelled  with  a  lame 
pensioner  who  had  drifted  there,  why 
heaven  knows,  and  one  morning  having 
missed  him  from  the  inn  where  they  were 
staying,  he  believed  he  had  gone  back 
to  the  island,  and  searched  everywhere  and 
questioned  everybody,  till  he  understood 
of  a  sudden  that  he  was  jealous  as  though 
the  island  were  a  woman. 

The  book  seems  dull  if  you  read  much 
at  a  time,  as  the  later  Kerry  essays  do  not, 
but  nothing  that  he  has  written  recalls  so 
completely  to  my  senses  the  man  as  he 
was  in  daily  life ;  and  as  I  read,  there  are 
moments  when  every  line  of  his  face, 
every  inflection  of  his  voice,  grows  so 
clear  in  memory  that  I  cannot  realise  that 


SYNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  173 

he  is  dead.  He  was  no  nearer  when  we 
walked  and  talked  than  now  while  I  read 
these  unarranged,  unspeculating  pages, 
wherein  the  only  life  he  loved  with  his 
whole  heart  reflects  itself  as  in  the  still 
water  of  a  pool.  Thought  comes  to  him 
slowly,  and  only  after  long  seemingly 
unmeditative  watching,  and  when  it 
comes  (and  he  had  the  same  character  in 
matters  of  business),  it  is  spoken  without 
hesitation  and  never  changed.  His  con- 
versation was  not  an  experimental  thing, 
an  instrument  of  research,  and  this  made 
him  silent ;  while  his  essays  recall  events, 
on  which  one  feels  that  he  pronounces  no 
judgment  even  in  the  depth  of  his  own 
mind,  because  the  labour  of  Life  itself 
had  not  yet  brought  the  philosophic  gen- 
eralisation, which  was  almost  as  much  his 
object  as  the  emotional  generalisation 
of  beauty.  A  mind  that  generalises 
rapidly,  continually  prevents  the  experi- 
ence that  would  have  made  it  feel  and  see 
deeply,  just  as  a  man  whose  character  is 
too  complete  in  youth  seldom  grows  into 
any  energy  of  moral  beauty.     Synge  had 


174   SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

indeed  no  obvious  ideals,  as  these  are 
understood  by  young  men,  and  even  as 
I  think  disliked  them,  for  he  once  com- 
plained to  me  that  our  modern  poetry  was 
but  the  poetry  'of  the  lyrical  boy,'  and 
this  lack  makes  his  art  have  a  strange 
wildness  and  coldness,  as  of  a  man  born 
in  some  far-off  spacious  land  and  time. 

X 

There  are  artists  like  Byron,  like  Goethe, 
like  Shelley,  who  have  impressive  personali- 
ties, active  wills  and  all  their  faculties  at 
the  service  of  the  will ;  but  he  belonged  to 
those  who  like  Wordsworth,  like  Coleridge, 
like  Goldsmith,  like  Keats,  have  little 
personality,  so  far  as  the  casual  eye  can 
see,  little  personal  will,  but  fiery  and  brood- 
ing imagination.  I  cannot  imagine  him 
anxious  to  impress,  or  convince  in  any  com- 
pany, or  saying  more  than  was  sufficient 
to  keep  the  talk  circling.  Such  men  have 
the  advantage  that  all  they  write  is  a  part 
of  knowledge,  but  they  are  powerless 
before  events  and    have  often   but    one 


8TNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  175 

visible  strength,  the  strength  to  reject  from 
Hfe  and  thought  all  that  would  mar  their 
work,  or  deafen  them  in  the  doing  of  it; 
and  only  this  so  long  as  it  is  a  passive  act. 
If  Synge  had  married  young  or  taken  some 
profession,  I  doubt  if  he  would  have 
written  books  or  been  greatly  interested 
in  a  movement  like  ours ;  but  he  refused 
various  opportunities  of  making  money 
in  what  must  have  been  an  almost  un- 
conscious preparation.  He  had  no  life 
outside  his  imagination,  little  interest  in 
anything  that  was  not  its  chosen  subject. 
He  hardly  seemed  aware  of  the  existence 
of  other  writers.  I  never  knew  if  he 
cared  for  work  of  mine,  and  do  not  re- 
member that  I  had  from  him  even  a 
conventional  compliment,  and  yet  he  had 
the  most  perfect  modesty  and  simplicity  in 
daily  intercourse,  self-assertion  was  im- 
possible to  him.  On  the  other  hand,  he 
was  useless  amidst  sudden  events.  He 
was  much  shaken  by  the  Playboy  riot; 
on  the  first  night  confused  and  excited, 
knowing  not  what  to  do,  and  ill  before 
many  days,   but    it  made  no   difference 


176   STNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

in  his  work.  He  neither  exaggerated  out 
of  defiance  nor  softened  out  of  timidity. 
He  wrote  on  as  if  nothing  had  happened, 
altering  The  Tinker's  Wedding  to  a 
more  unpopular  form,  but  writing  a  beau- 
tiful serene  Deirdre,  with,  for  the  first 
time  since  his  Riders  to  the  Sea,  no  touch 
of  sarcasm  or  defiance.  Misfortune  shook 
his  physical  nature  while  it  left  his  intellect 
and  his  moral  nature  untroubled.  The 
external  self,  the  mask,  the  persona,  was 
a  shadow,  character  was  all. 


XI 


He  was  a  drifting  silent  man  full  of 
hidden  passion,  and  loved  wild  islands, 
because  there,  set  out  in  the  light  of  day, 
he  saw  what  lay  hidden  in  himself.  There 
is  passage  after  passage  in  which  he  dwells 
upon  some  moment  of  excitement.  He 
describes  the  shipping  of  pigs  at  Kilronan 
on  the  North  Island  for  the  English  market : 
'when  the  steamer  was  getting  near,  the 
whole  drove  was  moved  down  upon  the 
slip   and   the   curraghs   were  carried  out 


STNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  177 

close  to  the  sea.  Then  each  beast  was 
caught  in  its  turn  and  thrown  on  its  side, 
while  its  legs  were  hitched  together  in  a 
single  knot,  with  a  tag  of  rope  remaining, 
by  which  it  could  be  carried. 

'Probably  the  pain  inflicted  was  not 
great,  yet  the  animals  shut  their  eyes  and 
shrieked  with  almost  human  intonations, 
till  the  suggestion  of  the  noise  became 
so  intense  that  the  men  and  women  who 
were  merely  looking  on  grew  wild  with 
excitement,  and  the  pigs  waiting  their  turn 
foamed  at  the  mouth  and  tore  each  other 
with  their  teeth. 

'  After  a  while  there  was  a  pause.  The 
whole  slip  was  covered  with  a  mass  of 
sobbing  animals,  with  here  and  there  a 
terrified  woman  crouching  among  the 
bodies  and  patting  some  special  favourite, 
to  keep  it  quiet  while  the  curraghs  were 
being  launched.  Then  the  screaming  be- 
gan again  while  the  pigs  were  carried 
out  and  laid  in  their  places,  with  a  waist- 
coat tied  round  their  feet  to  keep  them 
from  damaging  the  canvas.  They  seemed 
to    know    where    they    were    going,    and 


178   SYNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

looked  up  at  me  over  the  gunnel  with  an 
ignoble  desperation  that  made  me  shudder 
to  think  that  I  had  eaten  this  whimpering 
flesh.  When  the  last  curragh  went  out, 
I  was  left  on  the  slip  with  a  band  of 
women  and  children,  and  one  old  boar 
who  sat  looking  out  over  the  sea. 

'  The  women  were  over-excited,  and  when 
I  tried  to  talk  to  them  they  crowded  round 
me  and  began  jeering  and  shrieking  at  me 
because  I  am  not  married.  A  dozen 
screamed  at  a  time,  and  so  rapidly  that 
I  could  not  understand  all  they  were  say- 
ing, yet  I  was  able  to  make  out  that  they 
were  taking  advantage  of  the  absence  of 
their  husbands  to  give  me  the  full  volume 
of  their  contempt.  Some  little  boys  who 
were  listening  threw  themselves  down, 
writhing  with  laughter  among  the  sea- 
weed, and  the  young  girls  grew  red  and 
embarrassed  and  stared  down  in  the  surf.'* 
The  book  is  full  of  such  scenes.  Now 
it  is  a  crowd  going  by  train  to  the  Parnell 
celebration,  now  it  is  a  woman  cursing 
her  son  who  made  himself  a  spy  for  the 
police,  now  it  is  an  old  woman  keening  at  a 


STNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  179 

funeral.  Kindred  to  his  delight  in  the 
harsh  grey  stones,  in  the  hardship  of  the 
life  there,  in  the  wind  and  in  the  mist, 
there  is  always  delight  in  every  moment 
of  excitement,  whether  it  is  but  the 
hysterical  excitement  of  the  women  over 
the  pigs,  or  some  primary  passion.  Once 
indeed,  the  hidden  passion  instead  of 
finding  expression  by  its  choice  among  the 
passions  of  others  shows  itself  in  the 
most  direct  way  of  all,  that  of  dream. 
'Last  night,'  he  writes,  at  Innismaan, 
'after  walking  in  a  dream  among  buildings 
with  strangely  intense  light  on  them,  I 
heard  a  faint  rhythm  of  music  beginning 
far  away  on  some  stringed  instrument. 

'  It  came  closer  to  me,  gradually  increas- 
ing in  quickness  and  volume  with  an  irre- 
sistibly definite  progression.  When  it  was 
quite  near  the  sound  began  to  move  in  my 
nerves  and  blood,  to  urge  me  to  dance  with 
them. 

'I  knew  that  if  I  yielded  I  would  be 
carried  away  into  some  moment  of  terrible 
agony,  so  I  struggled  to  remain  quiet, 
holding  my  knees  together  with  my  hands. 


180   STNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

'  The  music  increased  continually,  sound- 
ing like  the  strings  of  harps  tuned  to  a 
forgotten  scale,  and  having  a  resonance  as 
searching  as  the  strings  of  the  'cello. 

'Then  the  luring  excitement  became 
more  powerful  than  my  will,  and  my 
limbs  moved  in  spite  of  me. 

'  In  a  moment  I  swept  away  in  a  whirl- 
wind of  notes.  My  breath  and  my 
thoughts  and  every  impulse  of  my  body 
became  a  form  of  the  dance,  till  I  could  not 
distinguish  between  the  instrument  or 
the  rhythm  and  my  own  person  or  con- 
sciousness. 

'  For  a  while  it  seemed  an  excitement  that 
was  filled  with  joy;  then  it  grew  into  an 
ecstasy  where  all  existence  was  lost  in  the 
vortex  of  movement.  I  could  not  think 
that  there  had  been  a  life  beyond  the 
whirling  of  the  dance. 

'  Then  with  a  shock,  the  ecstasy  turned 
to  agony  and  rage.  I  struggled  to  free 
myself  but  seemed  only  to  increase  the 
passion  of  the  steps  I  moved  to.  When 
I  shrieked  I  could  only  echo  the  notes  of 
the  rhythm. 


SYNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  181 

*  At  last,  with  a  movement  of  uncontroll- 
able frenzy  I  broke  back  to  consciousness 
and  awoke. 

'  I  dragged  myself  trembling  to  the 
window  of  the  cottage  and  looked  out. 
The  moon  was  glittering  across  the  bay 
and  there  was  no  sound  anywhere  on  the 
island.' 

XII 

In  all  drama  which  would  give  direct 
expression  to  reverie,  to  the  speech  of  the 
soul  with  itself,  there  is  some  device  that 
checks  the  rapidity  of  dialogue.  When 
(Edipus  speaks  out  of  the  most  vehement 
passions,  he  is  conscious  of  the  presence 
of  the  chorus,  men  before  whom  he  must 
keep  up  appearances,  '  children  latest  born 
of  Cadmus'  Hne'  who  do  not  share  his 
passion.  Nobody  is  hurried  or  breathless. 
We  listen  to  reports  and  discuss  them, 
taking  part  as  it  were  in  a  council  of  state. 
Nothing  happens  before  our  eyes.  The 
dignity  of  Greek  drama,  and  in  a  lesser 
degree  of  that  of  Corneille  and  Racine, 


182   STNGi:  A  ND  THE'  IllELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

depends,  as  contrasted  with  the  troubled 
Ufe  of  Shakespearean  drama,  on  an  almost 
even    speed    of    dialogue,    and    on    a    so 
continuous    exclusion    of    the    animation 
of    common    life,   that    thought    remains 
lofty    and    language    rich.     Shakespeare, 
upon  whose  stage  everything  may  happen, 
even   the   blinding   of   Gloster,    and   who 
has  no  formal  check  except  what  is  im- 
plied in  the  slow,  elaborate  structure  of 
blank  verse,  obtains  time  for  reverie  by  an 
often    encumbering    Euphuism,    and    by 
such  a  loosening  of  his  plot  as  will  give 
his  characters  the  leisure  to  look  at  Hfe 
from  without.     Maeterlinck  —  to  name  the 
first  modern  of  the  old  way  who  comes  to 
mind  —  reaches  the  same  end,  by  choosing 
instead  of  human  beings  persons  who  are 
as  faint  as  a  breath  upon  a  looking-glass, 
symbols  who  can  speak  a  language  slow 
and    heavy    with    dreams    because    then- 
own  life  is  but  a  dream.     Modern  drama, 
on  the  other  hand,  which  accepts  the  tight- 
ness of  the  classic  plot,  while  expressing  life 
directly,  has  been  driven  to  make  indirect 
its  expression  of  the  mind,  which  it  leaves 


STNGE  AND  TUE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  183 

to  be  inferred  from  some  common-place 
sentence  or  gesture  as  we  infer  it  in  ordi- 
nary life ;  and  this  is,  I  believe,  the  cause  of 
the  perpetual  disappointment  of  the  hope 
imagined  this  hundred  years  that  France 
or  Spain  or  Germany  or  Scandinavia  will 
at  last  produce  the  master  we  await. 

The  divisions  in  the  arts  are  almost  all 
in  the  first  instance  technical,  and  the 
great  schools  of  drama  have  been  divided 
from  one  another  by  the  form  or  the  metal 
of  their  mirror,  by  the  check  chosen  for 
the  rapidity  of  dialogue.  Synge  found  the 
check  that  suited  his  temperament  in  an 
elaboration  of  the  dialects  of  Kerry  and 
Aran.  The  cadence  is  long  and  medita- 
tive, as  befits  the  thought  of  men  who  are 
much  alone,  and  who  when  they  meet  in 
one  another's  houses  —  as  their  way  is  at 
the  day's  end  —  listen  patiently,  each  man 
speaking  in  turn  and  for  some  little  time, 
and  taking  pleasure  in  the  vaguer  meaning 
of  the  words  and  in  their  sound.  Their 
thought,  when  not  merely  practical,  is  as 
full  of  traditional  wisdom  and  extravagant 
pictures  as  that  of  some  ^Eschylean  chorus, 


184  SYNGEANB  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

and  no  matter  what  the  topic  is,  it  is  as 
though  the  present  were  held  at  arm's 
length.  It  is  the  reverse  of  rhetoric,  for 
the  speaker  serves  his  own  delight,  though 
doubtless  he  would  tell  you  that  like  Raft- 
ery's  whiskey-drinking  it  was  but  for  the 
company's  sake.  A  medicinal  manner  of 
speech  too,  for  it  could  not  even  express, 
so  little  abstract  it  is  and  so  rammed  with 
life,  those  worn  generalisations  of  national 
propaganda.  'I'll  be  telling  you  the  finest 
story  you'd  hear  any  place  from  Dundalk 
to  Ballinacree  with  gi-eat  queens  in  it^ 
making  themselves  matches  from  the  start 
to  the  end,  and  they  with  shiny  silks  on 
them.  .  .  I've  a  grand  story  of  the  great 
queens  of  Ireland,  with  white  necks  on 
them  the  like  of  Sarah  Casey,  and  fine 
arms  would  hit  you  a  slap.  .  .  .  What 
good  am  I  this  night,  God  help  me? 
What  good  are  the  grand  stories  I  have 
when  it's  few  would  listen  to  an  old  woman, 
few  but  a  girl  maybe  would  be  in  great  fear 
the  time  her  hour  was  come,  or  little  child 
wouldn't  be  sleeping  with  the  hunger  on 
a  cold  night.'    That  has  the  flavour  of 


STNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  185 

Homer,  of  the  Bible,  of  Villon,  while  Cer- 
vantes would  have  thought  it  sweet  in  the 
mouth  though  not  his  food.  This  use  of 
Irish  dialect  for  noble  purpose  by  Synge, 
and  by  Lady  Gregory,  who  had  it  already 
in  her  Cuchulain  of  Muirthemne,  and  by 
Dr.  Hyde  in  those  first  translations  he  has 
not  equalled  since,  has  done  much  for 
National  dignity.  When  I  was  a  boy  I 
was  often  troubled  and  sorrowful  because 
Scottish  dialect  was  capable  of  noble  use, 
but  the  Irish  of  obvious  roystering  humour 
only ;  and  this  error  fixed  on  my  imagina- 
tion by  so  many  novelists  and  rhymers 
made  me  listen  badly.  Synge  wrote  down 
words  and  phrases  wherever  he  went,  and 
with  that  knowledge  of  Irish  which  made 
all  our  country  idioms  easy  to  his  hand, 
found  it  so  rich  a  thing,  that  he  had  begun 
translating  into  it  fragments  of  the  great 
literatures  of  the  world,  and  had  planned 
a  complete  version  of  The  Imitation  of 
Christ.  It  gave  him  imaginative  richness 
and  yet  left  to  him  the  sting  and  tang  of 
reality.  How  vivid  in  his  translation  from 
Villon  are  those  'eyes  with  a  big  gay  look 


186   SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

out  of  them  would  bring  folly  from  a  great 
scholar.'  More  vivid  surely  than  any- 
thing in  Swinburne's  version,  and  how 
noble  those  words  which  are  yet  simple 
country  speech,  in  which  his  Petrarch 
mourns  that  death  came  upon  Laura  just 
as  time  was  making  chastity  easy,  and 
the  day  come  when  Covers  may  sit  to- 
gether and  say  out  all  things  are  in  their 
hearts,'  and  'my  sweet  enemy  was  making 
a  start,  Httle  by  little,  to  give  over  her 
great  wariness,  the  way  she  was  wi'inging 
a  sweet  thing  out  of  my  sharp  sorrow.' 

XIII 

Once  when  I  had  been  sajdng  that 
though  it  seemed  to  me  that  a  conventional 
descriptive  passage  encumbered  the  action 
at  the  moment  of  crisis,  I  Hked  The 
Shadow  of  the  Glen  better  than  Riders 
to  the  Sea,  that  is,  for  all  the  nobility  of  its 
end,  its  mood  of  Greek  tragedy,  too  passive 
in  suffering,  and  had  quoted  from  Mat- 
thew Arnold's  introduction  to  Empedocles 
on  Etna,  Synge  answered,  'It  is  a  curious 


SYNGEANB  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  187 

thing  that  The  Riders  to  the  Sea  succeeds 
with  an  Enghsh  but  not  with  an  Irish 
audience,  and  The  Shadow  of  the  Glen, 
which  is  not  hked  by  an  English  audience, 
is  always  liked  in  Ireland,  though  it 
is  disliked  there  in  theory.'  Since  then 
The  Riders  to  the  Sea  has  grown  into 
great  popularity  in  Dublin,  partly  because 
with  the  tactical  instinct  of  an  Irish  mob, 
the  demonstrators  against  The  Playboy 
both  in  the  press  and  in  the  theatre,  where 
it  began  the  evening,  selected  it  for  ap- 
plause. It  is  now  what  Shelley's  Cloud 
was  for  many  years  a  comfort  to  those  who 
do  not  like  to  deny  altogether  the  genius 
they  cannot  understand.  Yet  I  am  certain 
that,  in  the  long  run,  his  grotesque  plays 
with  their  lyric  beauty,  their  violent 
laughter,  The  Playboy  of  the  Western 
World  most  of  all,  will  be  loved  for  hold- 
ing so  much  of  the  mind  of  Ireland. 
Synge  has  written  of  The  Playboy,  'any- 
one who  has  lived  in  real  intimacy  with  the 
Irish  peasantry  will  know  that  the  wildest 
sayings  in  this  play  are  tame  indeed  com- 
pared with  the  fancies  one  may  hear  at  any 


188   SYNGE  AND  TEE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

little  hillside  cottage  of  Geesala,  or  Carra- 
roe,  or  Dingle  Bay.'  It  is  the  strangest, 
the  most  beautiful  expression  in  drama  of 
that  Irish  fantasy,  which  overflowing 
through  all  Irish  Literature  that  has  come 
out  of  Ireland  itself  (compare  the  fantastic 
Irish  account  of  the  Battle  of  Clontarf 
with  the  sober  Norse  account)  is  the  un- 
broken character  of  Irish  genius.  In 
modern  days  this  genius  has  delighted  in 
mischievous  extravagance,  like  that  of 
the  Gaelic  poet's  curse  upon  his  children, 
'There  are  three  things  that  I  hate,  the 
devil  that  is  waiting  for  my  soul,  the  worms 
that  are  waiting  for  my  body,  my  children, 
who  are  waiting  for  my  wealth  and  care 
neither  for  my  body  nor  my  soul :  Oh, 
Christ  hang  all  in  the  same  noose ! '  I 
think  those  words  were  spoken  with  a  de- 
light in  their  vehemence  that  took  out  of 
anger  half  the  bitterness  with  all  the  gloom. 
An  old  "man  on  the  Aran  Islands  told  me 
the  very  tale  on  which  The  Playboy 
is  founded,  beginning  with  the  words,  'If 
any  gentleman  has  done  a  crime  we'll  hide 
him.    There  was  a  gentleman  that  killed 


SYNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  189 

his  father,  and  I  had  him  in  my  own  house 
six  months  till  he  got  away  to  America.' 
Despite  the  solemnity  of  his  slow  speech 
his  eyes  shone  as  the  eyes  must  have  shone 
in  that  Trinity  College  branch  of  the  Gaelic 
League  which  began  every  meeting  with 
prayers  for  the  death  of  an  old  Fellow  of 
College  who  disliked  their  movement,  or 
as  they  certainly  do  when  patriots  are  tell- 
ing how  short  a  time  the  prayers  took  to 
the  killing  of  him.  I  have  seen  a  crowd, 
when  certain  Dublin  papers  had  wrought 
themselves  into  an  imaginary  loyalty,  so 
possessed  by  what  seemed  the  very  genius 
of  satiric  fantasy,  that  one  all  but  looked 
to  find  some  feathered  heel  among  the 
cobble  stones.  Part  of  the  delight  of 
crowd  or  individual  is  always  that  some- 
body will  be  angry,  somebody  take  the 
sport  for  gloomy  earnest.  We  are  mock- 
ing at  his  solemnity,  let  us  therefore  so  hide 
our  malice  that  he  may  be  more  solemn 
still,  and  the  laugh  run  higher  yet.  Why 
should  we  speak  his  language  and  so  wake 
him  from  a  dream  of  all  those  emotions 
which  men  feel  because  they  should,  and 


190  SYNGEANB  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

not  because  they  must  ?  Our  minds,  being 
sufficient  to  themselves,  do  not  wish  for 
victory  but  are  content  to  elaborate  our 
extravagance,  if  fortune  aid,  into  wit  or 
lyric  beauty,  and  as  for  the  rest  'There 
are  nights  when  a  king  like  Conchobar 
would  spit  upon  his  arm-ring  and  queens 
will  stick  out  their  tongues  at  the  rising 
moon.'  This  habit  of  the  mind  has  made 
Oscar  Wilde  and  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  the 
most  celebrated  makers  of  comedy  to  our 
time,  and  if  it  has  sounded  plainer  still  in 
the  conversation  of  the  one,  and  in  some 
few  speeches  of  the  other,  that  is  but  be- 
cause they  have  not  been  able  to  turn  out 
of  their  plays  an  alien  trick  of  zeal  picked 
up  in  struggling  youth.  Yet,  in  Synge's 
plays  also,  fantasy  gives  the  form  and  not 
the  thought,  for  the  core  is  always  as  in  all 
great  art,  an  over-powering  vision  of  cer- 
tain virtues,  and  our  capacity  for  sharing 
in  that  vision  is  the  measure  of  our  delight. 
Great  art  chills  us  at  first  by  its  coldness  or 
its  strangeness,  by  what  seems  capricious, 
and  yet  it  is  from  these  qualities  it  has  au- 
thority, as  though  it  had  fed  on  locust  and 


STNGEAND  TEE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME   191 

wild  honey.  The  imaginative  writer  shows 
us  the  world  as  a  painter  does  his  picture, 
reversed  in  a  looking-glass  that  we  may  see 
it,  not  as  it  seems  to  eyes  habit  has  made 
dull,  but  as  we  were  Adam  and  this  the 
first  morning;  and  when  the  new  image 
becomes  as  little  strange  as  the  old  we 
shall  stay  with  him,  because  he  has,  be- 
sides, the  strangeness,  not  strange  to  him, 
that  made  us  share  his  vision,  sincerity 
that  makes  us  share  his  feeling. 

To  speak  of  one's  emotions  without  fear 
or  moral  ambition,  to  come  out  from  under 
the  shadow  of  other  men's  minds,  to  forget 
their  needs,  to  be  utterly  oneself,  that  is  all 
the  Muses  care  for.  Villon,  pander,  thief 
and  man-slayer,  is  as  immortal  in  their 
eyes,  and  illustrates  in  the  cry  of  his  ruin 
as  great  a  truth  as  Dante  in  abstract 
ecstasy,  and  touches  our  compassion  more. 
All  art  is  the  disengaging  of  a  soul  from 
place  and  history,  its  suspension  in  a  beau- 
tiful or  terrible  light,  to  await  the  Judg- 
ment, and  yet,  because  all  its  days  were 
a  Last  Day,  judged  already.  It  may  show 
the  crimes  of  Italy  as  Dante  did,  or  Greek 


192    SYNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

mythology  like  Keats,  or  Kerry  and  Gal- 
way  villages,  and  so  vividly  that  ever  after 
I  shall  look  at  all  with  like  eyes,  and  yet 
I  know  that  Cino  da  Pistoia  thought 
Dante  unjust,  that  Keats  knew  no  Greek, 
that  those  country  men  and  women  are 
neither  so  lovable  nor  so  lawless  as  'mine 
author  sung  it  me ' ;  that  I  have  added  to 
my  being,  not  my  knowledge. 

XIV 

I  wrote  the  most  of  these  thoughts  in 
my  diary  on  the  coast  of  Normandy,  and 
as  I  finished  came  upon  Mont  Saint  Michel, 
and  thereupon  doubted  for  a  day  the  foun- 
dation of  my  school.  Here  I  saw  the  places 
of  assembly,  those  cloisters  on  the  rock's 
summit,  the  church,  the  great  halls  where 
monks,  or  knights,  or  men  at  arms  sat  at 
meals,  beautiful  from  ornament  or  propor- 
tion. I  remembered  ordinances  of  the 
Popes  forbidding  drinking-cups  with  stems 
of  gold  to  these  monks  who  had  but  a  bare 
dormitory  to  sleep  in.  Even  when  imagin- 
ing, the  individual  had  taken  more  from 


SYNGEAND  TEE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME   193 

his  fellows  and  his  fathers  than  he  gave; 
one  man  finishing  what  another  had  begun ; 
and  all  that  majestic  fantasy,  seeming 
more  of  Egypt  than  of  Christendom,  spoke 
nothing  to  the  sohtary  soul,  but  seemed  to 
announce  whether  past  or  yet  to  come  an 
heroic  temper  of  social  men,  a  bondage  of 
adventure  and  of  wisdom.  Then  I  thought 
more  patiently  and  I  saw  that  what  had 
made  these  but  as  one  and  given  them  for 
a  thousand  years  the  miracles  of  their 
shrine  and  temporal  rule  by  land  and  sea, 
was  not  a  condescension  to  knave  or  dolt, 
an  impoverishment  of  the  coimnon  thought 
to  make  it  serviceable  and  easy,  but  a  dead 
language  and  a  communion  in  whatever, 
even  to  the  greatest  saint,  is  of  incredible 
difficulty.  Only  by  the  substantiation  of 
the  soul  I  thought,  whether  in  literature 
or  in  sanctity,  can  we  come  upon  those 
agreements,  those  separations  from  all  else 
that  fasten  men  together  lastingly;  for 
while  a  popular  and  picturesque  Burns 
and  Scott  can  but  create  a  province,  and 
our  Irish  cries  and  grammars  serve  some 
passing  need.  Homer,  Shakespeare,  Dante, 


194   STNGE  AND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME 

Goethe  and  all  who  travel  in  their  road 
with  however  poor  a  stride  define  races 
and  create  everlasting  loyalties.     Synge, 
like  all  of  the  great  kin,  sought  for  the  race, 
not  through  the  eyes  or  in  history,  or  even 
in   the   future,    but   where   those   monks 
found  God,  in  the  depths  of  the  mind,  and 
in  all  art  like  his,  although  it  does  not 
command  —  indeed  because  it  does  not  — 
may  lie  the  roots  of  far-branching  events. 
Only  that  which  does  not  teach,  which 
does  not  cry  out,  which  does  not  persuade, 
which  does  not  condescend,  which  does  not 
explain,  is  irresistible.     It  is  made  by  men 
who  expressed  themselves  to  the  full,  and 
it  works  through  the  best  minds ;  whereas 
the  external  and  picturesque  and  declama- 
tory writers,  that  they  may  create  kilts 
and  bagpipes  and  newspapers  and  guide- 
books, leave  the  best  minds  empty,  and  in 
Ireland  and  Scotland,  England  runs  into 
the  hole.     It  has  no  array  of  arguments 
and  maxims,  because  the  great  and  the 
simple  (and  the  Muses  have  never  known 
which  of  the  two  most  pleases  them)  need 
their  deliberate  thought  for  the  day's  work, 


SYNGEAND  THE  IRELAND  OF  HIS  TIME  195 

and  yet  will  do  it  worse  if  they  have  not 
grown  into  or  found  about  them,  most 
perhaps  in  the  minds  of  women,  the  noble- 
ness of  emotion  associated  with  the  scenery 
and  events  of  their  country  by  those  great 
poets  who  have  dreamed  it  in  solitude,  and 
who  to  this  day  in  Europe  are  creating 
indestructible  spiritual  races,  like  those 
rehgion  has  created  in  the  East. 

September  14th,  1910. 


THE  TRAGIC  THEATRE 

I  DID  not  find  a  word  in  the  printed 
criticism  of  Synge's  Deirdre  of  the  Sor- 
rows about  the  quahties  that  made  certain 
moments  seem  to  me  the  noblest  tragedy, 
and  the  play  was  judged  by  what  seemed 
to  me  but  wheels  and  pulleys  necessary 
to  the  effect,  but  in  themselves  nothing. 

Upon  the  other  hand,  those  who  spoke 
to  me  of  the  play  never  spoke  of  these 
wheels  and  pulleys,  but  if  they  cared  at  all 
for  the  play,  cared  for  the  things  I  cared 
for.  One's  own  world  of  painters,  of 
poets,  of  good  talkers,  of  ladies  who  de- 
light in  Ricard's  portraits  or  Debussey's 
music,  all  those  whose  senses  feel  in- 
stantly every  change  in  our  mother  the 
moon,  saw  the  stage  in  one  way ;  and  those 
others  who  look  at  plays  every  night,  who 
tell  the  general  playgoer  whether  this  play 
or  that  play  is  to  his  taste,  saw  it  in  a  way 
so  different  that  there  is  certainly  some 
body  of  dogma  —  whether  in  the  instincts 
196 


THE  TRAGIC   THEATRE  197 

or  in  the  memory,  pushing  the  ways  apart. 
A  printed  criticism,  for  instance,  found  but 
one  dramatic  moment,  that  when  Deirdre 
in  the  second  act  overhears  her  lover  say 
that  he  may  grow  weary  of  her  ;^  and  not 
one  —  if  I  remember  rightly  —  chose  for 
praise  or  explanation  the  third  act  which 
alone  had  satisfied  the  author,  or  contained 
in  any  abundance  those  sentences  that  were 
quoted  at  the  fall  of  the  curtain  and  for 
days  after. 

Deirdre  and  her  lover,  as  Synge  tells  the 
tale,  returned  to  Ireland,  though  it  was 
nearly  certain  they  would  die  there,  because 
death  was  better  than  broken  love,  and  at 
the  side  of  the  open  gi-ave  that  had  been  dug 
for  one  and  would  serve  for  both,  quarrelled, 
losing  all  they  had  given  their  life  to  keep. 
'  Is  it  not  a  hard  thing  that  we  should  miss 
the  safety  of  the  grave  and  we  trampling 
its  edge?'  That  is  Deirdre's  cry  at  the 
outset  of  a  reverie  of  passion  that  mounts 
and  mounts  till  grief  itself  has  carried  her 
beyond  grief  into  pure  contemplation. 
Up  to  this  the  play  has  been  a  Master's 
unfinished  work,  monotonous  and  melan- 


198  THE  TRAGIC  THEATRE 

choly,  ill-arranged,  little  more  than  a 
sketch  of  what  it  would  have  grown  to, 
but  now  I  listened  breathless  to  sentences 
that  may  never  pass  away,  and  as  they 
filled  or  dwindled  in  their  civility  of  sorrow, 
the  player,  whose  art  had  seemed  clumsy 
and  incomplete,  like  the  writing  itself, 
ascended  into  that  tragic  ecstasy  which 
is  the  best  that  art  —  perhaps  that  life 
—  can  give.  And  at  last  when  Deirdre, 
in  the  paroxysm  before  she  took  her  life, 
touched  with  compassionate  fingers  him 
that  had  killed  her  lover,  we  knew  that  the 
player  had  become,  if  but  for  a  moment, 
the  creature  of  that  noble  mind  which  had 
gathered  its  art  in  waste  islands,  and  we 
too  were  carried  beyond  time  and  persons 
to  where  passion,  living  through  its  thou- 
sand purgatorial  years,  as  in  the  wink  of 
an  eye,  becomes  wisdom;  and  it  was  as 
though  we  too  had  touched  and  felt  and 
seen  a  disembodied  thing. 

One  dogma  of  the  printed  criticism  is 
that  if  a  play  does  not  contain  definite 
character,  its  constitution  is  not  strong 
enough  for  the  stage,  and  that  the  dra- 


THE  TBAGIC  THEATRE  199 

matic  moment  is  always  the  contest  of 
character  with  character. 

In  poetical  drama  there  is,  it  is  held,  an 
antithesis  between  character  and  lyric 
poetry,  for  lyric  poetry  —  however  much 
it  move  you  when  read  out  of  a  book  — 
can,  as  these  critics  think,  but  encumber 
the  action.  Yet  when  we  go  back  a  few 
centuries  and  enter  the  great  periods  of 
drama,  character  grows  less  and  sometimes 
disappears,  and  there  is  much  lyric  feeling, 
and  at  times  a  lyric  measure  will  be  wrought 
into  the  dialogue,  a  flowing  measure  that 
had  well-befitted  music,  or  that  more 
lumbering  one  of  the  sonnet.  Suddenly 
it  strikes  us  that  character  is  continu- 
ously present  in  comedy  alone,  and  that 
there  is  much  tragedy,  that  of  Corneille, 
that  of  Racine,  that  of  Greece  and  Rome, 
where  its  place  is  taken  by  passions  and 
motives,  one  person  being  jealous,  another 
full  of  love  or  remorse  or  pride  or  anger. 
In  writers  of  tragi-comedy  (and  Shake- 
speare is  always  a  writer  of  tragi-comedy) 
there  is  indeed  character,  but  we  notice 
that  it  is  in  the  moments  of  comedy  that 


200  THE  TRAGIC  THEATRE 

character  is  defined,  in  Hamlet's  gaiety 
let  us  say ;  while  amid  the  great  moments, 
when  Timon  orders  his  tomb,  when  Ham- 
let cries  to  Horatio  'absent  thee  from 
felicity  awhile,'  when  Anthony  names 
'Of  many  thousand  kisses  the  poor  last,' 
all  is  lyricism,  unmixed  passion,  'the 
integrity  of  fire.'  Nor  ,does  character 
ever  attain  to  complete  definition  in  these 
lamps  ready  for  the  taper,  no  matter  how 
circumstantial  and  gradual  the  opening 
of  events,  as  it  does  in  Falstaff  who  has  no 
passionate  purpose  to  fulfill,  or  as  it  does 
in  Henry  the  Fifth  whose  poetry,  never 
touched  by  lyric  heat,  is  oratorical;  nor 
when  the  tragic  reverie  is  at  its  height  do 
we  say,  'How  well  that  man  is  realised,  I 
should  know  him  were  I  to  meet  him  in  the 
street,'  for  it  is  always  ourselves  that  we  see 
upon  the  stage,  and  should  it  be  a  tragedy 
of  love  we  renew,  it  may  be,  some  loyalty 
of  our  youth,  and  go  from  the  theatre  with 
our  eyes  dim  for  an  old  love's  sake. 

I  think  it  was  while  rehearsing  a  trans- 
lation of  Les  Fourberies  de  Scapin  in 
Dublin,  and  noticing  how  passionless  it 


THE  TRAGIC  THEATRE  201 

all  was,  that  I  saw  what  should  have  been 
plain  from  the  first  line  I  had  written,  that 
tragedy  must  always  be  a  drowning  and 
breaking  of  the  dykes  that  separate  man 
from  man,  and  that  it  is  upon  these  dykes 
comedy  keeps  house.  But  I  was  not  cer- 
tain of  the  site  (one  always  doubts  when 
one  knows  no  testimony  but  one's  own) ; 
till  somebody  told  me  of  a  certain  letter  of 
Congreve's.  He  describes  the  external 
and  superficial  expressions  of  'humour' 
on  which  farce  is  founded  and  then  defines 
'humour'  itself,  the  foundation  of  comedy 
as  a  'singular  and  unavoidable  way  of 
doing  anything  peculiar  to  one  man  only, 
by  which  his  speech  and  actions  are  dis- 
tinguished from  all  other  men,'  and  adds 
to  it  that '  passions  are  too  powerful  in  the 
sex  to  let  humour  have  its  course,'  or  as  I 
would  rather  put  it,  that  you  can  find  but 
little  of  what  we  call  character  in  un- 
spoiled youth,  whatever  be  the  sex,  for 
as  he  indeed  shows  in  another  sentence,  it 
grows  with  time  like  the  ash  of  a  burning 
stick,  and  strengthens  towards  middle  life 
till  there  is  little  else  at  seventy  years. 


202  THE  TRAGIC  THEATRE 

Since  then  I  have  discovered  an  antago- 
nism between  all  the  old  art  and  our  new 
art  of  comedy  and  understand  why  I  hated 
at  nineteen  years  Thackeray's  novels  and 
the  new  French  painting.  A  big  picture 
of  cocottes  sitting  at  little  tables  outside 
a  cafe,  by  some  follower  of  Manet's,  was 
exhibited  at  the  Royal  Hibernian  Academy 
while  I  was  a  student  at  a  life  class  there, 
and  I  was  miserable  for  days.  I  found  no 
desirable  place,  no  man  I  could  have  wished 
to  be,  no  woman  I  could  have  loved,  no 
Golden  Age,  no  lure  for  secret  hope,  no 
adventure  with  myself  for  theme  out  of 
that  endless  tale  I  told  myself  all  day  long. 
Years  after  I  saw  the  Olympia  of  Manet  at 
the  Luxembom-g  and  watched  it  without 
hostility  indeed,  but  as  I  might  some  in- 
comparable talker  whose  precision  of  ges- 
ture gave  me  pleasure,  though  I  did  not  un- 
derstand his  language.  I  returned  to  it  again 
and  again  at  intervals  of  years,  saying  to  my- 
self, '  some  day  I  will  understand ' ;  and  yet, 
it  was  not  until  Sir  Hugh  Lane  brought 
the  Eva  Gonzales  to  Dublin,  and  I  had  said 
to  myself,  'How  perfectly  that  woman  is 


THE  TRAGIC  THEATRE  203 

realised  as  distinct  from  all  other  women 
that  have  lived  or  shall  live '  that  I  under- 
stood I  was  carrying  on  in  my  own  mind 
that  quarrel  between  a  tragedian  and  a 
comedian  which  the  Devil  on  Two  Sticks 
in  Le  Sage  showed  to  the  young  man  who 
had  climbed  through  the  window. 

There  is  an  art  of  the  flood,  the  art  of 
Titian  when  his  Ariosto,  and  his  Bacchus 
and  Ariadne,  give  new  images  to  the  dreams 
of  youth,  and  of  Shakespeare  when  he 
shows  us  Hamlet  broken  away  from  life 
by  the  passionate  hesitations  of  his  reverie. 
And  we  call  this  art  poetical,  because  we 
must  bring  more  to  it  than  our  daily  mood 
if  we  would  take  our  pleasure;  and  be- 
cause it  delights  in  picturing  the  moment 
of  exaltation,  of  excitement,  of  dreaming 
(or  in  the  capacity  for  it,  as  in  that  still  face 
of  Ariosto 's  that  is  like  some  vessel  soon 
to  be  full  of  wine).  And  there  is  an  art 
that  we  call  real,  because  character  can 
only  express  itself  perfectly  in  a  real  world, 
being  that  world's  creature,  and  because  we 
understand  it  best  through  a  delicate  dis- 
crimination of  the  senses  which  is  but  en- 


•sr- 


204  TEE  TBAGIC  THEATRE 

tire  wakefulness,  the  daily  mood  grown  cold 
and  crystalline. 

We  may  not  find  either  mood  in  its 
purity,  but  in  mainly  tragic  art  one  dis- 
tinguishes devices  to  exclude  or  lessen 
character,  to  diminish  the  power  of  that 
daily  mood,  to  cheat  or  blind  its  too  clear 
perception.  If  the  real  world  is  not  alto- 
gether rejected,  it  is  but  touched  here  and 
there,  and  into  the  places  we  have  left  empty 
we  summon  rhythm,  balance,  pattern, 
images  that  remind  us  of  vast  passions, 
the  vagueness  of  past  times,  all  the  chimeras 
that  haunt  the  edge  of  trance ;  and  if  we 
are  painters,  we  shall  express  personal  emo- 
tion through  ideal  form,  a  symbolism  han- 
dled by  the  generations,  a  mask  from  whose 
eyes  the  disembodied  looks,  a  style  that 
remembers  many  masters,  that  it  may  es- 
cape contemporary  suggestion ;  or  we  shall 
leave  out  some  element  of  reality  as  in 
^Byzantine  painting,  where  there  is  no 
mass,  nothing  in  relief,  and  so  it  is  that  in 
the  supreme  moment  ofHragic  art  there 
comes  upon  one  that  strange  sensation 
as  though  the  hair  of  one's  head  stood  up. 


THE   TRAGIC  THEATRE  205 

And  when  we  love,  if  it  be  in  the  excitement 
of  youth,  do  we  not  also,  that  the  flood  may 
find  no  stone  to  convulse,  no  wall  to  nar- 
row it,  exclude  character  or  the  signs  of  it 
by  choosing  that  beauty  which  seems  un- 
earthly because  the  individual  woman  is 
lost  amid  the  labyrinth  of  its  hues  as  though 
life  were  trembling  into  stillness  and  silence, 
or  at  last  folding  itself  away  ?  Some  little 
irrelevance  of  line,  some  promise  of  char- 
acter to  come,  may  indeed  put  us  at  our  ease, 
'  give  more  interest '  as  the  humour  of  the 
old  man  with  the  basket  does  to  Cleo- 
patra's dying;  but  should  it  come  as  we 
had  dreamed  in  love's  frenzy  to  our  dying 
for  that  woman's  sake,  we  would  find  that 
the  discord  had  its  value  from  the  tune. 

Nor  have  we  chosen  illusion  in  choosing 
the  outward  sign  of  that  moral  genius  that 
lives  among  the  subtlety  of  the  passions, 
and  can  for  her  moment  make  her  of  the  one 
mind  with  great  artists  and  poets.  In  the 
studio  we  may  indeed  say  to  one  another 
'character  is  the  only  beauty,'  but  when 
we  choose  a  wife,  as  when  we  go  to  the 
gynmasium  to  be  shaped  for  woman's  eyes, 


206  THE  TRAGIC  THEATRE 

we  remember  academic  form,  even  though 
we  enlarge  a  Httle  the  point  of  interest  and 
choose  ''a  painter's  beauty,"  finding  it  the 
more  easy  to  beHeve  in  the  fire  because  it 
has  made  ashes. 

When  we  look  at  the  faces  of  the  old 
tragic  paintings,  whether  it  is  in  Titian 
or  in  some  painter  of  medieval  China,  we 
■find  there  sadness  and  gravity,  a  cer- 
tain emptiness  even,  as  of  a  mind  that 
waited  the  supreme  crisis  (and  indeed  it 
seems  at  times  as  if  the  graphic  art,  unlike 
poetry  which  sings  the  crisis  itself,  were 
the  celebration  of  waiting).  Whereas  in 
modern  art,  whether  in  Japan  or  Europe, 
'  vitahty '  (is  not  that  the  great  word  of  the 
studios?),  the  energy,  that  is  to  say,  which 
is  under  the  command  of  our  conamon  mo- 
ments, sings,  laughs,  chatters  or  looks  its 
busy  thoughts. 

Certainly  we  have  here  the  Tree  of 
Life  and  that  of  the  knowledge  of  Good  and 
Evil  which  is  rooted  in  our  interests,  and 
if  we  have  forgotten  their  differing  vir- 
tues it  is  surely  because  we  have  taken 
delight  in  a  confusion  of  crossing  branches. 


THE  TRAGIC  THEATRE  207 

Tragic  art,  passionate  art,  the  drowner  of 
dykes,  the  confounder  of  understanding, 
moves  us  by  setting  us  to  reverie,  by  allur- 
ing us  almost  to  the  intensity  of  trance. 
The  persons  upon  the  stage,  let  us  say, 
greaten  till  they  are  humanity  itself.  We 
feel  our  minds  expand  convulsively  or 
spread  out  slowly  like  some  moon-brightened 
image-crowded  sea.  That  which  is  before 
our  eyes  perpetually  vanishes  and  returns 
again  in  the  midst  of  the  excitement  it 
creates,  and  the  more  enthralling  it  is,  the 
more  do  we  forget  it. 

August,  1910. 


JOHN  SHAWE-TAYLOR 

There  is  a  portrait  of  John  Shawe- 
Taylor  by  a  celebrated  painter  in  the 
Dubhn  Municipal  Gallery,  but  painted  in 
the  midst  of  a  movement  of  the  arts  that 
exalts  characteristics  above  the  more  typical 
qualities,  it  does  not  show  us  that  beauti- 
ful and  gracious  nature.  There  is  an  exag- 
geration of  the  hollows  of  the  cheeks  and 
of  the  form  of  the  bones  which  empties 
the  face  of  the  balance  and  delicacy  of  its 
lines.  He  was  a  very  handsome  man,  as 
women  who  have  imagination  and  tradi- 
tion understand  those  words,  and  had  he 
not  been  so,  mind  and  character  had  been 
different.  There  are  certain  men,  certain 
famous  commanders  of  antiquity,  for  in- 
stance, of  whose  good  looks  the  historian 
always  speaks,  and  whose  good  looks  are 
the  image  of  their  faculty ;  and  these  men 
copying  hawk  or  leopard  have  an  energy  of 
swift  decision,  a  power  of  sudden  action, 
as  if  their  whole  body  were  their  brain. 
208 


JOHN  SHAWE-TAYLOR  209 

A  few  years  ago  he  was  returning  from 
America,  and  the  hner  reached  Queenstown 
in  a  storm  so  great  that  the  tender  that 
came  out  to  it  for  passengers  returned  with 
only  one  man.  It  was  John  Shawe-Taylor, 
who  had  leaped  as  it  was  swept  away  from 
the  ship. 

The  achievement  that  has  made  his 
name  historic  and  changed  the  history  of 
Ireland  came  from  the  same  faculty  of 
calculation  and  daring,  from  that  instant 
decision  of  the  hawk,  between  the  move- 
ment of  whose  wings  and  the  perception 
of  whose  eye  no  time  passes  capable  of 
division.  A  proposal  for  a  Land  Con- 
ference had  been  made,  and  cleverer  men 
than  he  were  but  talking  the  life  out  of  it. 
Every  argument  for  and  against  had  been 
debated  over  and  over,  and  it  was  plain 
that  nothing  but  argument  would  come 
of  it.  One  day  we  found  a  letter  in  the 
daily  papers,  signed  with  his  name,  saying 
that  a  conference  would  be  held  on  a  certain 
date,  and  that  certain  leaders  of  the  land- 
lords and  of  the  tenants  were  invited. 
He  had  made  his  swift  calculation,  prob- 


210  JOHN  SBAWE-TATLOR 

ably  he  could  not  have  told  the  reason  for 
it,  a  decision  had  arisen  out  of  his  in- 
stinct. He  was  then  almost  an  unknown 
man.  Had  the  letter  failed,  he  would 
have  seemed  a  crack-brained  fool  to  his 
life's  end;  but  the  calculation  of  his 
genius  was  justified.  He  had,  as  men  of 
his  type  have  often,  given  an  expression 
to  the  hidden  popular  desires;  and  the 
expression  of  the  hidden  is  the  daring  of 
the  mind.  When  he  had  spoken,  so  many 
others  spoke  that  the  thing  was  taken  out 
of  the  mouths  of  the  leaders,  it  was  as 
though  some  power  deeper  than  our  daily 
thought  had  spoken,  and  men  recognised 
that  common  instinct,  that  common  sense 
which  is  genius.  Men  like  him  live  near 
this  power  because  of  something  simple 
and  impersonal  within  them  which  is,  as 
I  believe,  imaged  in  the  fire  of  their 
minds,  as  in  the  shape  of  their  bodies  and 
their  faces. 

I  do  not  think  I  have  known  another  man 
whose  motives  were  so  entirely  pure,  so 
entirely  unmixed  with  any  personal  calcu- 
lation, whether  of  ambition,  of  prudence 


JOHN  SHAWE-TAYLOR  211 

or  of  vanity.  He  caught  up  into  his  im- 
agination the  pubhc  gain  as  other  men 
their  private  gain.  For  much  of  his  Hfe 
he  had  seemed,  though  a  good  soldier 
and  a  good  shot,  and  a  good  rider  to 
hounds,  to  care  deeply  for  nothing  but 
religion,  and  this  religion,  so  curiously 
lacking  in  denominational  limits,  con- 
cerned itself  alone  with  the  communion 
of  the  soul  with  God.  Such  men,  before 
some  great  decision,  will  sometimes  give 
to  the  analysis  of  their  own  motive  the 
energy  that  other  men  give  to  the  ex- 
amination of  the  circumstances  wherein 
they  act,  and  it  is  often  those  who 
attain  in  this  way  to  purity  of  motive 
who  act  most  wisely  at  moments  of  great 
crisis.  It  is  as  though  they  sank  a  well 
through  the  soil  where  our  habits  have 
been  built,  and  where  our  hopes  take  root 
and  are  again  uprooted,  to  the  lasting  rock 
and  to  the  living  stream.  They  are  those 
for  whom  Tennyson  claimed  the  strength 
of  ten,  and  the  common  and  clever  wonder 
at  their  simplicity  and  at  a  triumph  that 
has  always  an  air  of  miracle  about  it. 


212  JOHN  SHAWE-TAYLOR 

Some  two  years  ago  Ireland  lost  a  great 
aesthetic  genius,  and  it  may  be  it  should 
mourn,  as  it  must  mourn  John  Synge 
always,  that  which  is  gone  from  it  in  this 
man's  moral  genius.  And  yet  it  may  be 
that,  though  he  died  in  early  manhood,  his 
work  was  finished,  that  the  sudden  flash  of 
his  mind  was  of  those  things  that  come 
but  seldom  in  a  lifetime,  and  that  his  name 
is  as  much  a  part  of  history  as  though  he 
had  lived  through  many  laborious  years. 

July  1,  1911. 


EDMUND  SPENSER 


We  know  little  of  Spenser's  childhood 
and  nothing  of  his  parents,  except  that  his 
father  was  probably  an  Edmund  Spenser 
of  north-east  Lancashire,  a  man  of  good 
blood  and  '  belonging  to  a  house  of  ancient 
fame.'  He  was  born  in  London  in  1552, 
nineteen  years  after  the  death  of  Ariosto, 
and  when  Tasso  was  about  eight  years  old. 
Full  of  the  spirit  of  the  Renaissance,  at 
once  passionate  and  artificial,  looking  out 
upon  the  world  now  as  craftsman,  now  as 
connoisseur,  he  was  to  found  his  art  upon 
theirs  rather  than  upon  the  more  humane, 
the  more  noble,  the  less  intellectual  art  of 
Malory  and  the  Minstrels.  Deafened  and 
blinded  by  their  influence,  as  so  many  of 
us  were  in  boyhood  by  that  art  of  Hugo, 
that  made  the  old  simple  writers  seem  but 
as  brown  bread  and  water,  he  was  always 
to  love  the  journey  more  than  its  end,  the 
213 


214  EDMUND  SPENSER 

landscape  more  than  the  man,  and  reason 
more  than  Hfe,  and  the  tale  less  than  its 
telling.  He  entered  Pembroke  College, 
Cambridge,  in  1569,  and  translated  alle- 
gorical poems  out  of  Petrarch  and  Du 
Bellay.  To-day  a  young  man  translates 
out  of  Verlaine  and  Verhaeren ;  but  at  that 
day  Ronsard  and  Du  Bellay  were  the  liv- 
ing poets,  who  promised  revolutionary 
and  unheard-of  things  to  a  poetry  moviT^g 
towards  elaboration  and  intellect,  as  ours 

—  the  serpent's  tooth  in  his  own  tail  again 

—  moves  towards  simplicity  and  instinct. 
At  Cambridge  he  met  with  Hobbinol  of 
The  Shepheards  Calender,  a  certain  Gabriel 
Harvey,  son  of  a  rope-maker  at  Saffron 
Walden,  but  now  a  Fellow  of  Pembroke 
College,  a  notable  man,  some  five  or  six 
years  his  elder.  It  is  usual  to  think  ill  of 
Harvey  because  of  his  dislike  of  rhyme  and 
his  advocacy  of  classical  metres,  and  be- 
cause he  complained  that  Spenser  pre- 
ferred his  Faerie  Queene  to  the  Nine  Muses, 
and  encouraged  Hobgoblin  'to  run  off 
with  the  Garland  of  Apollo.'  But  at  that 
crossroad,  where  so  many  crowds  mingled 


EDMUND  SPENSER  215 

talking  of  so  many  lands,  no  one  could 
foretell  in  what  bed  he  would  sleep  after 
nightfall.  Milton  was  in  the  end  to  dis- 
like rhjone  as  much,  and  it  is  certain  that 
rhyme  is  one  of  the  secondary  causes  of 
that  disintegration  of  the  personal  instincts 
which  has  given  to  modern  poetry  its  deep 
colour  for  colour's  sake,  its  overflowing 
pattern,  its  background  of  decorative 
landscape,  and  its  insubordination  of  de- 
tail. At  the  opening  of  a  movement  we  are 
busy  with  first  principles,  and  can  find  out 
everything  but  the  road  we  are  to  go, 
everything  but  the  weight  and  measure 
of  the  impulse,  that  has  come  to  us  out  of 
life  itself,  for  that  is  always  in  defiance  of 
reason,  always  without  a  justification  but 
by  faith  and  works.  Harvey  set  Spenser 
to  the  making  of  verses  in  classical  metre, 
and  certain  lines  have  come  down  to  us 
written  in  what  Spenser  called  'lambicum 
trimetrum.'  His  biographers  agree  that 
they  are  very  bad,  but,  though  I  cannot 
scan  them,  I  find  in  them  the  charm  of 
what  seems  a  sincere  personal  emotion. 
The  man  himself,  liberated  from  the  mi- 


216  EDMUND  SPENSER 

nute  felicities  of  phrase  and  sound,  that 
are  the  temptation  and  the  dehght  of 
rhjrme,  speaks  of  his  Mistress  some  thought 
that  came  to  him  not  for  the  sake  of  poetry, 
but  for  love's  sake,  and  the  emotion  instead 
of  dissolving  into  detached  colours,  into 
'the  spangly  gloom'  that  Keats  saw  'froth 
and  boil'  when  he  put  his  eyes  into  'the 
pillowy  cleft,'  speaks  to  her  in  poignant 
words  as  if  out  of  a  tear-stained  love-letter : 

*  Unhappie  verse,  the  witnesse  of  my  unhappie  state, 
Make  thy  selfe  fluttring  winge  for  thy  fast  flying 
Thought,  and  fly  forth  to  my  love  wheresoever  she 

be. 
Whether  lying  restlesse  in  heavy  bedde,  or  else 
Sitting  so  cheerlesse  at  the  cheerful  boorde,  or  else 
Playing  alone  carelesse  on  her  heavenlie  virginals. 
If  in  bed,  tell  hir  that  my  eyes  can  take  no  rest; 
If  at  boorde  tell  her  that  my  mouth  can  eat  no 

meate 
If  at  her  virginals,  tell  her  that  I  can  heare  no 

mirth.' 

II 

He  left  College  in  his  twenty-fourth 
year,  and  stayed  for  a  while  in  Lancashire, 
where  he  had  relations,  and  there  fell  in 


EDMUND  SPENSER  217 

love  with  one  he  has  written  of  in  The 
Shepheards  Calender  as  'Rosahnd,  the  wid- 
dowes  daughter  of  the  Glenn,'  though 
she  was,  for  all  her  shepherding,  as  one 
learns  from  a  College  friend,  'a  gentle- 
woman of  no  mean  house.'  She  married 
Menalchus  of  the  Calender  amd  Spenser 
lamented  her  for  years,  in  verses  so  full 
of  disguise  that  one  cannot  say  if  his 
lamentations  come  out  of  a  broken  heart 
or  are  but  a  useful  movement  in  the  elab- 
orate ritual  of  his  poetry,  a  well-ordered 
incident  in  the  mythology  of  his  imagina- 
tion. To  no  English  poet,  perhaps  to  no 
European  poet  before  his  day,  had  the  nat- 
ural expression  of  personal  feeling  been  so 
impossible,  the  clear  vision  of  the  linea- 
ments of  human  character  so  difficult ;  no 
other's  head  and  eyes  had  sunk  so  far 
into  the  pillowy  cleft.  After  a  year  of 
this  life  he  went  to  London,  and  by  Har- 
vey's advice  and  introduction  entered  the 
service  of  the  Earl  of  Leicester,  staying 
for  a  while  in  his  house  on  the  banks  of 
the  Thames ;  and  it  was  there  in  all  likeli- 
hood that  he  met  with  the  Earl's  nephew, 


218  EDMUND  SPENSEB 

Sir  Philip  Sidney,  still  little  more  than  a 
boy,  but  with  his  head  full  of  affairs  of 
state.  One  can  imagine  that  it  was  the 
great  Earl  or  Sir  Philip  Sidney  that  gave 
his  imagination  its  moral  and  practical 
turn,  and  one  imagines  him  seeking  from 
philosophical  men,  who  distrust  instinct 
because  it  disturbs  contemplation,  and 
from  practical  men  who  distrust  every- 
thing they  cannot  use  in  the  routine 
of  immediate  events,  that  impulse  and 
method  of  creation  that  can  only  be  learned 
with  surety  from  the  technical  criticism  of 
poets,  and  from  the  excitement  of  some 
movement  in  the  artistic  life.  Marlowe 
and  Shakespeare  were  still  at  school,  and 
Ben  Jonson  was  but  five  years  old.  Sidney 
was  doubtless  the  greatest  personal  in- 
fluence that  came  into  Spenser's  life,  and 
it  was  one  that  exalted  moral  zeal  above 
every  other  faculty.  The  great  Earl  im- 
pressed his  imagination  very  deeply  also, 
for  the  lamentation  over  the  Earl  of  Leices- 
ter's death  is  more  than  a  conventional 
Ode  to  a  dead  patron.  Spenser's  verses 
about  men,  nearly  always  indeed,  seem  to 


EDMUND  SPENSER  219 

express  more  of  personal  joy  and  sorrow 
than  those  about  women,  perhaps  because 
he  was  less  deliberately  a  poet  when  he 
spoke  of  men.  At  the  end  of  a  long  beau- 
tiful passage  he  laments  that  unworthy 
men  should  be  in  the  dead  Earl's  place, 
and  compares  them  to  the  fox  —  an  im- 
clean  feeder  —  hiding  in  the  lair  '  the 
badger  swept.'  The  imaginer  of  the  fes- 
tivals of  Kenilworth  was  indeed  the  fit 
patron  for  him,  and  alike,  because  of  the 
strength  and  weakness  of  Spenser's  art, 
one  regrets  that  he  could  not  have  lived 
always  in  that  elaborate  life,  a  master  of 
ceremony  to  the  world,  instead  of  being 
plunged  into  a  life  that  but  stirred  him 
to  bitterness,  as  the  way  is  with  theoret- 
ical minds  in  the  tumults  of  events  they 
cannot  understand.  In  the  winter  of 
1579-80  he  published  The  Shepheards  Cal- 
ender, a  book  of  twelve  eclogues,  one  for 
every  month  of  the  year,  and  dedicated  it 
to  Sir  Philip  Sidney.  It  was  full  of  pas- 
toral beauty  and  allegorical  images  of 
current  events,  revealing  too  that  conflict 
between  the  aesthetic  and  moral  interests 


220  EDMUND  SPENSER 

that  was  to  run  through  well-nigh  all  his 
works,  and  it  became  immediately  famous. 
He  was  rewarded  with  a  place  as  private 
secretary  to  the  Lord  Lieutenant,  Lord 
Grey  de  Wilton,  and  sent  to  Ireland, 
where  he  spent  nearly  all  the  rest  of  his 
life.  After  a  few  years  there  he  bought 
Kilcolman  Castle,  which  had  belonged  to 
the  rebel  Earl  of  Desmond,  and  the  rivers 
and  hills  about  this  castle  came  much  into 
his  poetry.  Our  Irish  Aubeg  is  'Mulla 
mine,  whose  waves  I  taught  to  weep,'  and 
the  Ballyvaughan  Hills,  it  has  its  rise 
among  'old  Father  Mole.'  He  never 
pictured  the  true  countenance  of  Irish 
scenery,  for  his  mind  turned  constantly 
to  the  courts  of  Elizabeth  and  to  the 
umbrageous  level  lands,  where  his  own 
race  was  already  seeding  like  a  great 
poppy : 

'Both  heaven  and  heavenly  graces  do  much  more 
(Quoth  he),  abound  in  that  same  land  then  this : 
For  there  all  happie  peace  and  plenteous  store 
Conspire  in  one  to  make  contented  blisse. 
No  wayhng  there  nor  wretchednesse  is  heard, 
No  bloodie  issues  nor  no  leprosies, 


EDMUND  SPENSER  221 

No  griesly  famine,  nor  no  raging  sweard, 
No  nightly  bordrags,  nor  no  hue  and  cries ; 
The  shepheards  there  abroad  may  safely  lie 
On  hills  and  downes,  withouten  dread  or  daunger, 
No  ravenous  wolves  the  good  mans  hope  destroy, 
Nor  outlawes  fell  affray  the  forest  raunger, 
The  learned  arts  do  florish  in  great  honor, 
And  Poets  wits  are  had  in  peerlesse  price.' 

Nor  did  he  ever  understand  the  people 
he  hved  among  or  the  historical  events 
that  were  changing  all  things  about  him. 
Lord  Grey  de  Wilton  had  been  recalled 
almost  immediately,  but  it  was  his 
policy,  brought  over  ready-made  in  his 
ship,  that  Spenser  advocated  throughout 
all  his  life,  equally  in  his  long  prose  book 
The  State  of  Ireland  as  in  the  Faerie  Queene, 
where  Lord  Grey  was  Artigall  and  the 
Iron  man  the  soldiers  and  executioners  by 
whose  hands  he  worked.  Like  an  hys- 
terical patient  he  drew  a  comphcated  web 
of  inhuman  logic  out  of  the  bowels  of  an 
insufficient  premise  —  there  was  no  right, 
no  law,  but  that  of  Elizabeth,  and  all 
that  opposed  her  opposed  themselves  to 
God,  to  civilisation,  and  to  all  inherited 


222  EDMUND  SPENSER 

wisdom  and  courtesy,  and  should  be  put 
to  death.     He  made  two  visits  to  England, 
celebrating  one  of  them  in  Colin  Clouts 
come  Home  againe,   to   publish   the  first 
three  books  and  the  second  three  books 
of  the  Faerie  Queene  respectively,  and  to 
try  for  some   English   office  or  pension. 
By  the  help  of  Raleigh,  now  his  neighbour 
at  Kilcolman,   he  had  been  promised  a 
pension,  but  was  kept  out  of  it  by  Lord 
Burleigh,  who  said,  'All  that  for  a  song!' 
From  that  day  Lord  Burleigh  became  that 
'rugged   forehead'   of   the   poems,   whose 
censure  of  this  or  that  is  complained  of. 
During  the  last  three  or  four  years  of  his 
life  in  Ireland  he  married  a  fair  woman  of 
his  neighbourhood,  and  about  her  wrote 
many    intolerable    artificial    sonnets    and 
that  most  beautiful  passage  in  the  sixth 
book  of  the  Faerie  Queene,  which  tells  of 
Colin  Clout  piping  to  the  Graces  and  to 
her;    and  he  celebrated  his  marriage  in 
the  most  beautiful  of  all  his  poems,  the 
Epithalamium.    His  genius  was  pictorial, 
and  these  pictures  of  happiness  were  niore 
natural   to    it  than    any  personal  pride, 


EDMUND  SPENSER  223 

or  joy,  or  sorrow.  His  new  happiness 
was  very  brief,  and  just  as  he  was  rising 
to  something  of  Milton's  grandeur  in  the 
fragment  that  has  been  called  Mutabilitie, 
'the  wandering  companies  that  keep  the 
woods,'  as  he  called  the  Irish  armies, 
drove  him  to  his  death.  Ireland,  where 
he  saw  nothing  but  work  for  the  Iron  man, 
was  in  the  midst  of  the  last  struggle  of 
the  old  Celtic  order  with  England,  itself 
about  to  turn  bottom  upward,  of  the  pas- 
sion of  the  Middle  Ages  with  the  craft 
of  the  Renaissance.  Seven  years  after 
Spenser's  arrival  in  Ireland  a  large  mer- 
chant ship  had  carried  off  from  Loch 
Swilly,  by  a  very  crafty  device  common  in 
those  days,  certain  persons  of  importance. 
Red  Hugh,  a  boy  of  fifteen,  and  the  coming 
head  of  Tirconnell,  and  various  heads  of 
clans  had  been  enticed  on  board  the  mer- 
chant ship  to  drink  of  a  fine  vintage,  and 
there  made  prisoners.  All  but  Red  Hugh 
were  released,  on  finding  substitutes  among 
the  boys  of  their  kindred,  and  the  captives 
were  hurried  to  Dublin  and  imprisoned  in 
the  Birmingham  Tower.     After  four  years 


224  EDMUND  SPENSER 

of  captivity  and  one  attempt  that  failed,  Red 
Hugh  and  certain  of  his  companions  escaped 
into  the  DubUn  mountains,  one  dying  there 
of  cold  and  privation,  and  from  that  to 
their  own  country-side.     Red  Hugh  allied 
himself  to  Hugh  O'Neil,  the  most  powerful 
of    the    Irish    leaders  — 'Oh,   deep,    dis- 
sembHng  heart,  born  to  great  weal  or  woe 
of  thy  country  !'   an  English  historian  had 
cried  to  him  —  an  Oxford  man  too,  a  man 
of  the  Renaissance,  and  for  a  few  years 
defeated   English   armies  and  shook   the 
power  of  England.    The  Irish,  stirred  by 
these   events,   and   with   it  maybe   some 
rumours   of    The   State  of  Ireland  stick- 
ing   in    their    stomachs,    drove    Spenser 
out  of  doors  and  burnt  his  house,  one  of 
his    children,   as  tradition   has  it,   dying 
in  the  fire.    He  fled  to  England,  and  died 
some  three  months  later  in  January,  1599, 
as  Ben  Jonson  says,  'of  lack  of  bread.' 

During  the  last  four  or  five  years  of  his 
life  he  had  seen,  without  knowing  that  he 
saw  it,  the  beginning  of  the  great  Eliza- 
bethan poetical  movement.  In  1598  he 
had  pictured  the  Nine  Muses  lamenting 


EDMUND  SPENSER  225 

each  one  over  the  evil  state  in  England,  of 
the  things  that  she  had  in  charge,  but,  like 
Wilham  Blake's  more  beautiful  Whether  on 
Ida's  shady  brow,  their  lamentations  should 
have  been  a  cradle-song.  When  he  died 
Romeo  and  Juliet,  Richard  III.,  and  Rich- 
ard II.,  and  the  plays  of  Marlowe  had  all 
been  acted,  and  in  stately  houses  were 
sung  madrigals  and  love  songs  whose  like 
has  not  been  in  the  world  since.  Italian 
influence  had  strengthened  the  old  French 
joy  that  had  never  died  out  among  the 
upper  classes,  and  an  art  was  being  created 
for  the  last  time  in  England  which  had 
half  its  beauty  from  continually  suggesting 
a  life  hardly  less  beautiful  than  itself. 

1  HI 

'  When  Spenser  was  buried  at  West- 
minster Abbey  many  poets  read  verses  in 
his  praise,  and  then  threw  their  verses  and 
the  pens  that  had  written  them  into  his 
tomb.  Like  him  they  belonged,  for  all 
the  moral  zeal  that  was  gathering  like  a 
London  fog,  to  that  indolent,  demonstra- 


226  EDMUND  SPENSER 

tive  Merry  England  that  was  about  to 
pass  away.  Men  still  wept  when  they 
were  moved,  still  dressed  themselves  in 
joyous  colours,  and  spoke  with  many 
gestures.  Thoughts  and  qualities  some- 
times come  to  their  perfect  expression 
when  they  are  about  to  pass  away,  and 
Merry  England  was  dying  in  plays,  and  in 
poems,  and  in  strange  adventurous  men. 
If  one  of  those  poets  who  threw  his  copy 
of  verses  into  the  earth  that  was  about  to 
close  over  his  master  were  to  come  alive 
again,  he  would  find  some  shadow  of  the 
life  he  knew,  though  not  the  art  he  knew, 
among  young  men  in  Paris,  and  would 
think  that  his  true  country.  If  he  came 
to  England  he  would  find  nothing  there 
but  the  triumph  of  the  Puritan  and  the 
merchant  —  those  enemies  he  had  feared 
and  hated  —  and  he  would  weep  perhaps, 
in  that  womanish  way  of  his,  to  think  that 
so  much  greatness  had  been,  not  as  he  had 
hoped,  the  dawn,  but  the  sunset  of  a  people. 
He  had  lived  in  the  last  days  of  what  we 
may  call  the  Anglo-French  nation,  the  old 
feudal  nation  that  had  been   estabUshed 


EDMUND  SPENSER  227 

when  the  Norman  and  the  Angevin  made 
French  the  language  of  court  and  market. 
In  the  time  of  Chaucer  Enghsh  poets  still 
wrote  much  in  French,  and  even  Enghsh 
labourers  lilted  French  songs  over  their 
work ;  and  I  cannot  read  any  Elizabethan 
poem  or  romance  without  feeling  the 
pressure  of  habits  of  emotion,  and  of  an 
order  of  life  which  were  conscious,  for  all 
their  Latin  gaiety,  of  a  quarrel  to  the  death 
with  that  new  Anglo-Saxon  nation  that 
was  arising  amid  Puritan  sermons  and 
Mar-Prelate  pamphlets.  This  nation  had 
driven  out  the  language  of  its  conquerors, 
and  now  it  was  to  overthrow  their  beau- 
tiful haughty  imagination  and  their  man- 
ners, full  of  abandon  and  wilfulness, 
and  to  set  in  their  stead  earnestness  and 
logic  and  the  timidity  and  reserve  of  a 
counting-house.  It  had  been  coming  for 
a  long  while,  for  it  had  made  the  Lollards ; 
and  when  Anglo-French  Chaucer  was  at 
Westminster  its  poet,  Langland,  sang  the 
office  at  St.  Paul's.  Shakespeare,  with  his 
delight  in  great  persons,  with  his  indiffer- 
ence to  the  State,  with  his  scorn  of  the 


228  EDMUND  SPENSER 

crowd,  with  his  feudal  passion,  was  of  the 
old  nation,  and  Spenser,  though  a  joyless 
earnestness  had  cast  shadows  upon  him, 
and  darkened  his  intellect  wholly  at  times, 
was  of  the  old  nation  too.  His  Faerie 
Queene  was  written  in  Merry  England, 
but  when  Bunyan  wrote  in  prison  the  other 
great  English  allegory.  Modern  England 
had  been  born.  Bunyan's  men  would  do 
right  that  they  might  come  some  day  to 
the  Delectable  Mountain,  and  not  at  all 
that  they  might  live  happily  in  a  world 
whose  beauty  was  but  an  entanglement 
about  their  feet.  Religion  had  denied 
the  sacredness  of  an  earth  that  commerce 
was  about  to  corrupt  and  ravish,  but  when 
Spenser  lived  the  earth  had  still  its  shel- 
tering sacredness.  His  religion,  where 
the  paganism  that  is  natural  to  proud  and 
happy  people  had  been  strengthened  by 
the  platonism  of  the  Renaissance,  cher- 
ished the  beauty  of  the  soul  and  the  beauty 
of  the  body  with,  as  it  seemed,  an  equal 
affection.  He  would  have  had  men  live 
well,  not  merely  that  they  might  win 
eternal  happiness  but  that  they  might  live 


EDMUND  SPENSER  229 

splendidly  among  men  and  be  celebrated 
in  many  songs.  How  could  one  live  well 
if  one  had  not  the  joy  of  the  Creator  and 
of  the  Giver  of  gifts?  He  says  in  his 
Hymn  to  Beauty  that  a  beautiful  soul, 
unless  for  some  stubbornness  in  the  ground, 
makes  for  itself  a  beautiful  body,  and  he 
even  denies  that  beautiful  persons  ever 
lived  who  had  not  souls  as  beautiful. 
They  may  have  been  tempted  until  they 
seemed  evil,  but  that  was  the  fault  of 
others.  And  in  his  Hymn  to  Heavenly 
Beauty  he  sets  a  woman  little  known  to 
theology,  one  that  he  names  Wisdom  or 
Beauty,  above  Seraphim  and  Cherubim 
and  in  the  very  bosom  of  God,  and  in  the 
Faerie  Queene  it  is  pagan  Venus  and  her 
lover  Adonis  who  create  the  forms  of  all 
living  things  and  send  them  out  into  the 
world,  calling  them  back  again  to  the  gar- 
dens of  Adonis  at  their  lives'  end  to  rest 
there,  as  it  seems,  two  thousand  years 
between  life  and  life.  He  began  in  Eng- 
lish poetry,  despite  a  temperament  that 
delighted  in  sensuous  beauty  alone  with 
perfect  delight,  that  worship  of  Intellectual 


230  EDMUND  SPENSER 

Beauty  which  Shelley  carried  to  a  greater 
subtlety  and  applied  to  the  whole  of  life. 

The  qualities,  to  each  of  whom  he  had 
planned  to  give  a  Knight,  he  had  borrowed 
from  Aristotle  and  partly  Christianised, 
but  not  to  the  forgetting  of  their  heathen 
birth.  The  chief  of  the  Knights,  who 
would  have  combined  in  himself  the  qual- 
ities of  all  the  others,  had  Spenser  lived  to 
finish  the  Faerie  Queene,  was  King  Arthur, 
the  representative  of  an  ancient  quality, 
Magnificence.  Born  at  the  moment  of 
change,  Spenser  had  indeed  many  Puritan 
thoughts.  It  has  been  recorded  that  he 
cut  his  hair  short  and  half  regretted  his 
hymns  to  Love  and  Beauty.  But  he  has 
himself  told  us  that  the  many-headed 
beast  overthrown  and  bound  by  Calidor, 
Knight  of  Courtesy,  was  Puritanism  itself. 
Puritanism,  its  zeal  and  its  narrowness,  and 
the  angry  suspicion  that  it  had  in  conamon 
with  all  movements  of  the  ill-educated, 
seemed  no  other  to  him  than  a  slanderer 
of  all  fine  things.  One  doubts,  indeed,  if 
he  could  have  persuaded  himself  that  there 
could  be  any  virtue  at  all  without  courtesy. 


EDMUND  SPENSER  231 

perhaps  without  something  of  pageant  and 
eloquence.  He  was,  I  think,  by  nature 
altogether  a  man  of  that  old  Catholic 
feudal  nation,  but,  like  Sidney,  he  wanted 
to  justify  himself  to  his  new  masters.  He 
wrote  of  knights  and  ladies,  wild  creatures 
imagined  by  the  aristocratic  poets  of  the 
twelfth  century,  and  perhaps  chiefly  by 
English  poets  who  had  still  the  French 
tongue;  but  he  fastened  them  with  alle- 
gorical nails  to  a  big  barn  door  of  common 
sense,  of  merely  practical  virtue.  Alle- 
gory itself  had  risen  into  general  impor- 
tance with  the  rise  of  the  merchant  class 
in  the  thirteenth  and  fourteenth  centuries ; 
and  it  was  natural  when  that  class  was 
about  for  the  first  time  to  shape  an  age  in 
its  image,  that  the  last  epic  poet  of  the  old 
order  should  mix  its  art  with  his  own 
long-descended,  irresponsible,  happy  art. 

IV 

Allegory  and,  to  a  much  greater  degree, 
symbolism  are  a  natural  language  by  which 
the  soul  when  entranced,  or  even  in  ordi- 


232  EDMUND   SPENSEE 

nary  sleep,  communes  with  God  and  with 
angels.  They  can  speak  of  things  which 
cannot  be  spoken  of  in  any  other  language, 
but  one  will  always,  I  think,  feel  some 
sense  of  unreality  when  they  are  used  to 
describe  things  which  can  be  described  as 
well  in  ordinary  words.  Dante  used  alle- 
gory to  describe  visionary  things,  and  the 
first  maker  of  The  Romance  of  the  Rose,  for 
all  his  lighter  spirits,  pretends  that  his 
adventures  came  to  him  in  a  vision  one 
May  morning ;  while  Bunyan,  by  his  pre- 
occupation with  heaven  and  the  soul,  gives 
his  simple  story  a  visionary  strangeness  and 
intensity:  he  believes  so  little  in  the  world, 
that  he  takes  us  away  from  all  ordinary 
standards  of  probability  and  makes  us 
believe  even  in  allegory  for  a  while. 
Spenser,  on  the  other  hand,  to  whom  alle- 
gory was  not,  as  I  think,  natural  at  all, 
makes  us  feel  again  and  again  that  it  dis- 
appoints and  interrupts  our  preoccupation 
with  the  beautiful  and  sensuous  life  he  has 
called  up  before  our  eyes.  It  interrupts  us 
most  when  he  copies  Langland,  and  writes 
in  what  he  believes  to  be  a  mood  of  edifica- 


EDMUND   SPENSER  233 

tion,  and  the  least  when  he  is  not  quite 
serious,  when  he  sets  before  us  some  proces- 
sion hke  a  court  pageant  made  to  celebrate 
a  wedding  or  a  crowning.  One  cannot 
think  that  he  should  have  occupied  him- 
self with  moral  and  religious  questions  at 
all.  He  should  have  been  content  to  be, 
as  Emerson  thought  Shakespeare  was,  a 
Master  of  the  Revels  to  mankind.  I  am 
certain  that  he  never  gets  that  visionary 
air  which  can  alone  make  allegory  real, 
except  when  he  writes  out  of  a  feeling  for 
glory  and  passion.  He  had  no  deep  moral 
or  religious  life.  He  has  never  a  line  like 
Dante's  'Thy  Will  is  our  Peace,'  or  like 
Thomas  a  Kempis's  'The  Holy  Spirit  has 
liberated  me  from  a  multitude  of  opinions,' 
or  even  like  Hamlet's  objection  to  the  bare 
bodkin.  He  had  been  made  a  poet  by 
what  he  had  almost  learnt  to  call  his  sins. 
If  he  had  not  felt  it  necessary  to  justify  his 
art  to  some  serious  friend,  or  perhaps  even 
to  'that  rugged  forehead,'  he  would  have 
written  all  his  life  long,  one  thinks,  of  the 
loves  of  shepherdesses  and  shepherds, 
among  whom  there  would  have  been  per- 


234  EDMUND  SPENSER 

haps  the  morals  of  the  dovecot.  One  is 
persuaded  that  his  morahty  is  official  and 
impersonal  —  a  system  of  life  which  it  was 
his  duty  to  support  —  and  it  is  perhaps 
a  half  understanding  of  this  that  has  made 
so  many  generations  believe  that  he  was 
the  first  poet  laureate,  the  first  salaried 
moralist  among  the  poets.  His  proces- 
sions of  deadly  sins,  and  his  houses,  where 
the  very  cornices  are  arbitrary  images  of 
virtue,  are  an  unconscious  hypocrisy,  an 
undelighted  obedience  to  the  'rugged  fore- 
head,' for  all  the  while  he  is  thinking  of 
nothing  but  lovers  whose  bodies  are  quiver- 
ing with  the  memory  or  the  hope  of  long 
embraces.  When  they  are  not  together, 
he  will  indeed  embroider  emblems  and 
images  much  as  those  great  ladies  of  the 
courts  of  love  embroidered  them  in  their 
castles;  and  when  these  are  imagined  out 
of  a  thirst  for  magnificence  and  not  thought 
out  in  a  mood  of  edification,  they  are 
beautiful  enough;  but  they  are  always 
tapestries  for  corridors  that  lead  to  lovers' 
meetings  or  for  the  walls  of  marriage 
chambers.     He  was  not  passionate,  for  the 


EDMUND  SPENSER  235 

passionate  feed  their  flame  in  wanderings 
and  absences,  when  the  whole  being  of  the 
beloved,  every  little  charm  of  body  and  of 
soul,  is  always  present  to  the  mind,  filhng 
it  with  heroical  subtleties  of  desire.  He  is 
a  poet  of  the  delighted  senses,  and  his  song 
becomes  most  beautiful  when  he  writes  of 
those  islands  of  Phsedria  and  Acrasia, 
which  angered  ^that  rugged  forehead,'  as 
it  seems,  but  gave  to  Keats  his  Belle  Dame 
sans  Merci  and  his  'perilous  seas  in  faery 
lands  forlorn,'  and  to  William  Morris  his 
'waters  of  the  wondrous  Isle.' 


The  dramatists  lived  in  a  disorderly 
world,  reproached  by  many,  persecuted 
even,  but  following  their  imagination 
wherever  it  led  them.  Their  imagination, 
driven  hither  and  thither  by  beauty  and 
sympathy,  put  on  something  of  the  nature 
of  eternity.  Their  subject  was  always 
the  soul,  the  whimsical,  self-awakening, 
self -exciting,  self-appeasing  soul.  They 
celebrated    its    heroical,   passionate    will 


236  EDMUND  SPENSER 

going  by  its  own  path  to  immortal  and  in- 
visible things.  Spenser,  on  the  other  hand, 
except  among  those  smooth  pastoral  scenes 
and  lovely  effeminate  islands  that  have 
made  him  a  great  poet,  tried  to  be  of  his 
time,  or  rather  of  the  time  that  was  all  but 
at  hand.  Like  Sidney,  whose  charm  it 
may  be  led  many  into  slavery,  he  per- 
suaded himself  that  we  enjoy  Virgil  be- 
cause of  the  virtues  of  ^Eneas,  and  so 
planned  out  his  immense  poem  that  it 
would  set  before  the  imagination  of  citi- 
zens, in  whom  there  would  soon  be 
no  great  energy,  innumerable  blameless 
iEneases.  He  had  learned  to  put  the  State, 
which  desires  all  the  abundance  for  itself, 
in  the  place  of  the  Church,  and  he  found 
it  possible  to  be  moved  by  expedient  emo- 
tions, merely  because  they  were  expedient, 
and  to  think  serviceable  thoughts  with  no 
self-contempt.  He  loved  his  Queen  a  little 
because  she  was  the  protectress  of  poets 
and  an  image  of  that  old  Anglo-French 
nation  that  lay  a-dying,  but  a  great  deal 
because  she  was  the  image  of  the  State 
which  had  taken  possession  of  his  con- 


EDMUND  SPENSER  237 

science.  She  was  over  sixty  years  old, 
and  ugly  and,  it  is  thought,  selfish,  but 
in  his  poetry  she  is  'fair  Cynthia,'  'a  crown 
of  lilies,'  'the  image  of  the  heavens,'  'with- 
out mortal  blemish,'  and  has  'an  angelic 
face,'  where  'the  red  rose'  has  'meddled 
with  the  white ' ;  '  Phoebus  thrusts  out  his 
golden  head'  but  to  look  upon  her,  and 
blushes  to  find  himself  outshone.  She  is 
'a  fourth  Grace,'  'a  queen  of  love,'  'a  sacred 
saint,'  and  'above  all  her  sex  that  ever  yet 
has  been.'  In  the  midst  of  his  praise  of 
his  own  sweetheart  he  stops  to  remember 
that  Elizabeth  is  more  beautiful,  and  an 
old  man  in  Daphnaida,  although  he  has 
been  brought  to  death's  door  by  the  death 
of  a  beautiful  daughter,  remembers  that 
though  his  daughter  'seemed  of  angelic 
race,'  she  was  yet  but  the  primrose  to 
the  rose  beside  EHzabeth.  Spenser  had 
learned  to  look  to  the  State  not  only  as  the 
rewarder  of  virtue  but  as  the  maker  of 
right  and  wrong,  and  had  begun  to  love 
and  hate  as  it  bid  him.  The  thoughts 
that  we  find  for  ourselves  are  timid  and  a 
little  secret,  but  those  modern  thoughts 


238  EDMUND  SPENSER 

that  we  share  with  large  numbers  are  con- 
fident and  very  insolent.     We  have  little 
else  to-day,  and  when  we  read  our  news- 
paper and  take  up  its  cry,  above  all  its 
cry  of  hatred,  we  will  not  think  very  care- 
fully,   for    we    hear    the    marching    feet. 
When  Spenser  wrote  of  Ireland  he  wrote 
as  an  official,  and  out  of  thoughts  and  emo- 
tions that  had  been  organised  by  the  State. 
He  was  the  first  of  many  Englishmen  to  see 
nothing  but  what  he  was  desired  to  see. 
Could  he  have  gone  there  as  a  poet  merely, 
he  might  have  found  among  its  poets  more 
wonderful  imaginations  than  even  those 
islands  of  Phaedria  and  Acrasia.     He  would 
have  found  among  wandering  story-tellers, 
not  indeed  his  own  power  of  rich,  sustained 
description,   for  that  belongs  to  lettered 
ease,   but   certainly   all   the   kingdom   of 
Faerie,   still  unfaded,   of  which  his  own 
poetry  was  often  but  a  troubled  image. 
He  would  have  found  men  doing  by  swift 
strokes  of  the  imagination  much  that  he 
was  doing  with  painful  intellect,  with  that 
imaginative  reason  that  soon  was  to  drive 
out  imagination  altogether  and  for  a  long 


EDMUND  SPENSER  239 

time.  He  would  have  met  with,  at  his 
own  door,  story-tellers  among  whom  the 
perfection  of  Greek  art  was  indeed  as  un- 
known as  his  own  power  of  detailed  descrip- 
tion, but  who,  none  the  less,  imagined 
or  remembered  beautiful  incidents  and 
strange,  pathetic  outcrying  that  made 
them  of  Homer's  lineage.  Flaubert  says 
somewhere,  'There  are  things  in  Hugo, 
as  in  Rabelais,  that  I  could  have  mended, 
things  badly  built,  but  then  what  thrusts 
of  power  beyond  the  reach  of  conscious 
art ! '  Is  not  all  history  but  the  coming  of 
that  conscious  art  which  first  makes  artic- 
ulate and  then  destroys  the  old  wild  energy? 
Spenser,  the  first  poet  struck  with  remorse, 
the  first  poet  who  gave  his  heart  to  the 
State,  saw  nothing  but  disorder,  where  the 
mouths  that  have  spoken  all  the  fables  of 
the  poets  had  not  yet  become  silent.  All 
about  him  were  shepherds  and  shepherd- 
esses still  living  the  life  that  made  Theoc- 
ritus and  Virgil  think  of  shepherd  and  poet 
as  the  one  thing;  but  though  he  dreamed 
of  Virgil's  shepherds  he  wrote  a  book  to  ad- 
vise, among  many  like  things,  the  harrying 


240  EDMUND   SPENSER 

of  all  that  followed  flocks  upon  the  hills, 
and  of  all  'the  wandering  companies  that 
keep  the  woods.'  His  View  of  the  State 
of  Ireland  commends  indeed  the  beauty  of 
the  hills  and  woods  where  they  did  their 
shepherding,  in  that  powerful  and  subtle 
language  of  his  which  I  sometimes  think 
more  full  of  youthful  energy  than  even  the 
language  of  the  great  playwrights.  He  is 
'sure  it  is  yet  a  most  beautiful  and  sweet 
country  as  any  under  heaven,'  and  that 
all  would  prosper  but  for  those  agitators, 
'those  wandering  companies  that  keep  the 
woods,'  and  he  would  rid  it  of  them  by 
a  certain  expeditious  way.  There  should 
be  four  great  garrisons.  'And  those  fowre 
garrisons  issuing  foorthe,  at  such  conven- 
ient times  as  they  shall  have  intelligence 
or  espiall  upon  the  enemye,  will  so  drive 
him  from  one  side  to  another  and  tennis 
him  amongst  them,  that  he  shall  finde  no- 
where safe  to  keepe  his  creete,  or  hide  him- 
selfe,  but  flying  from  the  fire  shall  fall  into 
the  water,  and  out  of  one  daunger  into 
another,  that  in  short  space  his  creete, 
which  is  his  moste  sustenence,  shall  be 


EDMUND  SPENSER  241 

wasted  in  preying,  or  killed  in  driving,  or 
starved  for  wante  of  pasture  in  the  woodes, 
and  he  himselfe  brought  soe  lowe,  that  he 
shall  have  no  harte  nor  abilitye  to  indure 
his  wretchednesse,  the  which  will  surely 
come  to  passe  in  very  short  space ;  for  one 
winters  well  following  of  him  will  so  plucke 
him  on  his  knees  that  he  will  never  be  able 
to  stand  up  agayne.' 

He  could  commend  this  expeditious 
way  from  personal  knowledge,  and  could 
assure  the  Queen  that  the  people  of  the 
country  would  soon  ^consume  themselves 
and  devoure  one  another.  The  proofs 
whereof  I  saw  sufficiently  ensampled  in 
these  late  warres  of  Mounster;  for  not- 
withstanding that  the  same  was  a  most 
rich  and  plentifull  countrey,  full  of  corne 
and  cattell,  that  you  would  have  thought 
they  would  have  bene  able  to  stand  long, 
yet  ere  one  yeare  and  a  halfe  they  were 
brought  to  such  wretchednesse,  as  that 
any  stonye  heart  would  have  rued  the 
same.  Out  of  every  corner  of  the  woodes 
and  glynnes  they  came  creeping  forth  upon 
theyr  hands,  for  theyr  legges  could  not 


242  EDMUND  SPENSER 

beare  them;  they  looked  hke  anatomyes 
of  death,  they  spake  Hke  ghosts  crying 
out  of  their  graves;  they  did  eate  of  the 
dead  carrions,  happy  were  they  if  they 
could  finde  them,  yea,  and  one  another 
soone  after,  insomuch  as  the  very  carcasses 
they  spared  not  to  scrape  out  of  theyr 
graves ;  and  if  they  found  a  plot  of  water- 
cresses  or  shamrokes,  there  they  flocked 
as  to  a  feast  for  the  time,  yet  not  able  long 
to  continue  therewithall ;  that  in  short 
space  there  were  none  allmost  left,  and  a 
most  populous  and  plentifull  countrey 
suddaynely  left  voyde  of  man  or  beast; 
yet  sure  in  all  that  warre,  there  perished 
not  many  by  the  sword,  but  all  by  the 
extremitye  of  famine.' 

VI 

In  a  few  years  the  Four  Masters  were 
to  write  the  history  of  that  time,  and  they 
were  to  record  the  goodness  or  the  bad- 
ness of  Irishman  and  Englishman  with 
entire  impartiahty.  They  had  seen  friends 
and  relatives  persecuted,  but  they  would 


EDMUND   SPENSER  243 

write  of  that  man's  poisoning  and  this 
man's  charities  and  of  the  fall  of  great 
houses,  and  hardly  with  any  other  emo- 
tion than  a  thought  of  the  pitiableness  of 
all  life.  Friend  and  enemy  would  be  for 
them  a  part  of  the  spectacle  of  the  world. 
They  remembered  indeed  those  Anglo- 
French  invaders  who  conquered  for  the 
sake  of  their  own  strong  hand,  and  when 
they  had  conquered  became  a  part  of  the 
life  about  them,  singing  its  songs,  when 
they  grew  weary  of  their  own  Iseult  and 
Guinevere.  The  Four  Masters  had  not 
come  to  understand,  as  I  think,  despite 
famines  and  exterminations,  that  new  in- 
vaders were  among  them,  who  fought  for 
an  alien  State,  for  an  alien  religion.  Such 
ideas  were  difficult  to  them,  for  they  be- 
longed to  the  old  individual,  poetical  life, 
and  spoke  a  language  even,  in  which  it  was 
all  but  impossible  to  think  an  abstract 
thought.  They  understood  Spain,  doubt- 
less, which  persecuted  in  the  interests  of 
religion,  but  I  doubt  if  anybody  in  Ireland 
could  have  understood  as  yet  that  the 
Anglo-Saxon    nation    was    beginning    to 


244  EDMUND  SPENSER 

persecute  in  the  service  of  ideas  it  believed 
to  be  the  foundation  of  the  State.  I  doubt 
if  anybody  in  Ireland  saw  that  with  cer- 
tainty, till  the  Great  Demagogue  had 
come  and  turned  the  old  house  of  the  noble 
into  'the  house  of  the  Poor,  the  lonely 
house,  the  accursed  house  of  Cromwell.' 
He  came,  another  Cairbry  Cat  Head,  with 
that  great  rabble,  who  had  overthrown 
the  pageantry  of  Church  and  Court,  but 
who  turned  towards  him  faces  full  of  the 
sadness  and  docility  of  their  long  servitude, 
and  the  old  individual,  poetical  life  went 
down,  as  it  seems,  for  ever.  He  had  stud- 
ied Spenser's  book  and  approved  of  it,  as 
we  know,  finding,  doubtless,  his  own  head 
there,  for  Spenser,  a  king  of  the  old  race, 
carried  a  mirror  which  showed  kings  yet 
to  come  though  but  kings  of  the  mob. 
Those  Bohemian  poets  of  the  theatres  were 
wiser,  for  the  States  that  touched  them 
nearly  were  the  States  where  Helen  and 
Dido  had  sorrowed,  and  so  their  mirrors 
showed  none  but  beautiful  heroical  heads. 
They  wandered  in  the  places  that  pale 
passion   loves,   and   were   happy,   as   one 


EDMUND  SPENSER  245 

thinks,  and  troubled  little  about  those 
marching  and  hoarse-throated  thoughts 
that  the  State  has  in  its  pay.  They  knew 
that  those  marchers,  with  the  dust  of  so 
many  roads  upon  them,  are  very  robust  and 
have  great  and  well-paid  generals  to  write 
expedient  despatches  in  sound  prose;  and 
they  could  hear  mother  earth  singing 
among  her  cornfields : 

,  'Weep  not,  my  wanton  !  smile  upon  my  knee; 
When  thou  art  old  there's  grief  enough  for  thee.' 

VII 

There  are  moments  when  one  can  read 
neither  Milton  nor  Spenser,  moments  when 
one  recollects  nothing  but  that  their  flesh 
had  partly  been  changed  to  stone,  but 
there  are  other  moments  when  one  recol- 
lects nothing  but  those  habits  of  emotion 
that  made  the  lesser  poet  especially  a  man 
of  an  older,  more  imaginative  time.  One 
remembers  that  he  delighted  in  smooth 
pastoral  places,  because  men  could  be  busy 
there  or  gather  together  there,  after  their 
work,  that  he  could  love  handiwork  and 


246  EDMUND   SPENSER 

the  hum  of  voices.  One  remembers  that 
he  could  still  rejoice  in  the  trees,  not  be- 
cause they  were  images  of  loneliness  and 
meditation,  but  because  of  their  service- 
ableness.  He  could  praise  'the  builder 
oake,'  'the  aspine,  good  for  staves,'  'the  cy- 
presse  funerall,'  'the  eugh,  obedient  to  the 
bender's  will,'  'the  birch  for  shaftes,'  'the 
sallow  for  the  mill,'  'the  mirrhe  sweete- 
bleeding  in  the  bitter  wound,'  '  the  fruitful 
olive,'  and  'the  carver  holme.'  He  was 
of  a  time  before  undelighted  labour  had 
made  the  business  of  men  a  desecration. 
He  carries  one's  memory  back  to  Virgil's 
and  Chaucer's  praise  of  trees,  and  to  the 
sweet-sounding  song  made  by  the  old  Irish 
poet  in  their  praise. 

I  got  up  from  reading  the  Faerie  Queene 
the  other  day  and  wandered  into  another 
room.  It  was  in  a  friend's  house,  and  I 
came  of  a  sudden  to  the  ancient  poetry  and 
to  our  poetry  side  by  side  —  an  engraving 
of  Claude's  '  Mill '  hung  under  an  engraving 
of  Turner's  'Temple  of  Jupiter.'  Those 
dancing  country-people,  those  cow-herds, 
resting  after  the  day's  work,  and  that  quiet 
mill-race  made  one  think  of  Merry  Eng- 


EDMUND  SPENSER  247 

land  with  its  glad  Latin  heart,  of  a  time 
when  men  in  every  land  found  poetry  and 
imagination  in  one  another's  company  and 
in  the  day's  labour.  Those  stately  god- 
desses, moving  in  slow  procession  towards 
that  marble  architrave  among  mysterious 
trees,  belong  to  Shelley's  thought,  and  to 
the  religion  of  the  wilderness  —  the  only 
religion  possible  to  poetry  to-day.  Cer- 
tainly Colin  Clout,  the  companionable 
shepherd,  and  Calidor,  the  courtly  man- 
at-arms,  are  gone,  and  Alastor  is  wandering 
from  lonely  river  to  river  finding  happiness 
in  nothing  but  in  that  star  where  Spenser 
too  had  imagined  the  fountain  of  perfect 
things.  This  new  beauty,  in  losing  so 
much,  has  indeed  found  a  new  loftiness,  a 
something  of  religious  exaltation  that  the 
old  had  not.  It  may  be  that  those  god- 
desses, moving  with  a  majesty  like  a  pro- 
cession of  the  stars,  mean  something  to  the 
soul  of  man  that  those  kindly  women  of  the 
old  poets  did  not  mean,  for  all  the  fulness  of 
their  breasts  and  the  joyous  gravity  of  their 
eyes.  Has  not  the  wilderness  been  at  all 
times  a  place  of  prophecy  ? 


248  EDMUND  SPENSER 

VIII 

Our  poetry,  though  it  has  been  a  dehber- 
ate  bringing  back  of  the  Latin  joy  and  the 
Latin  love  of  beauty,  has  had  to  put  off 
the  old  marching  rhythms,  that  once  de- 
lighted more  than  expedient  hearts,  in 
separating  itself  from  a  life  where  servile 
hands  have  become  powerful.  It  has 
ceased  to  have  any  burden  for  marching 
shoulders,  since  it  learned  ecstasy  from 
Smart  in  his  mad  cell,  and  from  Blake,  who 
made  joyous  little  songs  out  of  almost  unin- 
telligible visions,  and  from  Keats,  who  sang 
of  a  beauty  so  wholly  preoccupied  with  itself 
that  its  contemplation  is  a  kind  of  lingering 
trance.  The  poet,  if  he  would  not  carry 
burdens  that  are  not  his  and  obey  the  orders 
of  servile  lips,  must  sit  apart  in  contempla- 
tive indolence  playing  with  fragile  things. 

If  one  chooses  at  hazard  a  Spenserian 
stanza  out  of  Shelley  and  compares  it  with 
any  stanza  by  Spenser,  one  sees  the  change, 
though  it  would  be  still  more  clear  if  one 
had  chosen  a  lyrical  passage.  I  will  take 
a  stanza  out  of  Laon  and  Cythna,  for  that 


EDMUND   SPENSER  249 

is  story-telling  and  runs  nearer  to  Spenser 
than  the  meditative  Adonais: 

'  The  meteor  to  its  far  morass  returned : 
The  beating  of  our  veins  one  interval 
Made  still;  and  then  I  felt  the  blood  that  burned 
Within  her  frame,  mingle  with  mine,  and  fall 
Around  my  heart  Uke  fire;  and  over  all 
A  mist  was  spread,  the  sickness  of  a  deep" 
And  speechless  swoon  of  joy,  as  might  befall 
Two  disunited  spirits  when  they  leap 
In  union  from  this  earth's  obscure  and  fading  sleep. 

The  rhythm  is  varied  and  troubled,  and 
the  lines,  which  are  in  Spenser  like  bars  of 
gold  thrown  ringing  one  upon  another,  are 
broken  capriciously.  Nor  is  the  meaning 
the  less  an  inspiration  of  indolent  muses,  for 
it  wanders  hither  and  thither  at  the  beckon- 
ing of  fancy.  It  is  now  busy  with  a  meteor 
and  now  with  throbbing  blood  that  is  fire, 
and  with  a  mist  that  is  a  swoon  and  a 
sleep  that  is  life.  It  is  bound  together  by 
the  vaguest  suggestion,  while  Spenser's 
verse  is  always  rushing  on  to  some  pre- 
ordained thought.  'A  popular  poet'  can 
still  indeed  write  poetry  of  the  will,  just  as 
factory  girls  wear  the  fashion  of  hat  or  dress 


250  EDMUND   SPENSER 

the  moneyed  classes  wore  a  year  ago,  but 
'popular  poetry'  does  not  belong  to  the 
living  imagination  of  the  world.  Old 
writers  gave  men  four  temperaments,  and 
they  gave  the  sanguineous  temperament 
to  men  of  active  life,  and  it  is  precisely  the 
sanguineous  temperament  that  is  fading 
out  of  poetry  and  most  obviously  out  of 
what  is  most  subtle  and  living  in  poetry  — 
its  pulse  and  breath,  its  rhythm.  Because 
poetry  belongs  to  that  element  in  every 
race  which  is  most  strong,  and  therefore 
most  individual,  the  poet  is  not  stirred  to 
imaginative  activity  by  a  life  which  is  sur- 
rendering its  freedom  to  ever  new  elabora- 
tion, organisation,  mechanism.  He  has  no 
longer  a  poetical  will,  and  must  be  content 
to  write  out  of  those  parts  of  himself  which 
are  too  delicate  and  fiery  for  any  deadening 
exercise.  Every  generation  has  more  and 
more  loosened  the  rhythm,  more  and  more 
broken  up  and  disorganised,  for  the  sake 
of  subtlety  of  detail,  those  great  rhythms 
which  move,  as  it  were,  in  masses  of 
sound.  Poetry  has  become  more  spiritual, 
for   the   soul   is   of   all   things   the   most 


EDMUND  SPENSER  251 

delicately  organised,  but  it  has  lost  in 
weight  and  measure  and  in  its  power  of 
telling  long  stories  and  of  dealing  with 
great  and  compUcated  events.  Laon  and 
Cythna,  though  I  think  it  rises  sometimes 
into  loftier  air  than  the  Faerie  Queene; 
and  Endymion,  though  its  shepherds  and 
wandering  divinities  have  a  stranger  and 
more  intense  beauty  than  Spenser's,  have 
need  of  too  watchful  and  minute  atten- 
tion for  such  lengthy  poems.  In  William 
Morris,  indeed,  one  finds  a  music  smooth 
and  unexacting  like  that  of  the  old  story- 
tellers, but  not  their  energetic  pleasure, 
their  rhythmical  wills.  One  too  often 
misses  in  his  Earthly  Paradise  the  minute 
ecstasy  of  modern  song  without  finding 
that  old  happy-go-lucky  tune  that  had 
kept  the  story  marching. 

Spenser's  contemporaries,  writing  lyrics 
or  plays  full  of  lyrical  moments,  write  a 
verse  more  delicately  organised  than  his 
and  crowd  more  meaning  into  a  phrase  than 
he,  but  they  could  not  have  kept  one's 
attention  through  so  long  a  poem.  A 
friend  who  has  a  fine  ear  told  me  the  other 


252  EDMUND  SPENSER 

day  that  she  had  read  all  Spenser  with 
delight  and  yet  could  remember  only  four 
lines.  When  she  repeated  them  they  were 
from  the  poem  by  Matthew  Roydon,  which 
is  bound  up  with  Spenser  because  it  is  a 
commendation  of  Sir  Phihp  Sidney : 

*A  sweet,  attractive  kind  of  grace, 
A  full  assurance  given  by  looks, 
Continual  comfort  in  a  face, 
The  lineaments  of  Gospel  books.' 

Yet  if  one  were  to  put  even  these  lines  be- 
side a  fine  modern  song  one  would  notice 
that  they  had  a  stronger  and  rougher  energy, 
a  featherweight  more,  if  eye  and  ear  were 
fine  enough  to  notice  it,  of  the  active  will,  of 
the  happiness  that  comes  out  of  life  itself. 

IX 

I  have  put  into  this  book^  only  those 
passages  from  Spenser  that  I  want  to 
remember  and  carry  about  with  me.  I 
have  not  tried  to  select  what  people  call 
characteristic  passages,  for  that  is,  I  think, 

^  Poems  of  Spenser:  Selected  and  with  an  Introduc- 
tion by  W.  B.  Yeats.  (T.  C.  and  E.  C.  Jack,  Edin- 
burgh, N.D.) 


EDMUND   SPENSER  253 

the  way  to  make  a  dull  book.  One  never 
really  knows  anybody's  taste  but  one's 
own,  and  if  one  likes  anything  sincerely  one 
may  be  certain  that  there  are  other  people 
made  out  of  the  same  earth  to  like  it  too. 
I  have  taken  out  of  The  Shepheards  Calender 
only  those  parts  which  are  about  love  or 
about  old  age,  and  I  have  taken  out  of  the 
Faerie  Queene  passages  about  shepherds 
and  lovers,  and  fauns  and  satyrs,  and  a  few 
allegorical  processions.  I  find  that  though 
I  love  symbolism,  which  is  often  the  only 
fitting  speech  for  some  mystery  of  disem- 
bodied life,  I  am  for  the  most  part  bored 
by  allegory,  which  is  made,  as  Blake  says, 
'  by  the  daughters  of  memory,'  and  coldly, 
with  no  wizard  frenzy.  The  processions 
I  have  chosen  are  either  those,  like  the 
House  of  Mammon,  that  have  enough  an- 
cient mythology,  always  an  implicit  sym- 
bolism, or,  like  the  Cave  of  Despair, 
enough  sheer  passion  to  make  one  forget 
or  forgive  their  allegory,  or  else  they  are, 
like  that  vision  of  Scudamour,  so  visionary, 
so  full  of  a  sort  of  ghostly  midnight 
animation,  that  one  is  persuaded  that  they 


254  EDMUND   SPENSER 

had  some  strange  purpose  and  did  truly 
appear  in  just  that  way  to  some  mind  worn 
out   with   war   and   trouble.     The   vision 
of  Scudamour  is,  I  sometimes  think,  the 
finest  invention  in  Spenser.     Until  quite 
lately  I  knew  nothing  of  Spenser  but  the 
parts  I  had  read  as  a  boy.     I  did  not  know 
that  I  had  read  so  far  as  that  vision,  but 
year  after  year  this  thought  would  rise 
up  before  me  coming  from  I  knew  not 
where.    I  would  be  alone  perhaps  in  some 
old  building,  and  I  would  think  suddenly 
'  out  of  that  door  might  come  a  procession  of 
strange  people  doing  mysterious  things  with 
tumult.    They  would  walk  over  the  stone 
floor,  then  suddenly  vanish,  and  everything 
would  become  silent  again.'     Once  I  saw 
what  is  called,  I  think,  a  Board  School  con- 
tinuation class  play  Hamlet.    There  was  no 
stage,  but  they  walked  in  procession  into 
the  midst  of  a  large  room  full  of  visitors  and 
of  their  friends.    While  they  were  walking 
in,  that  thought  came  to  me  again  from  I 
knew  not  where.     I  was  alone  in  a  great 
church  watching  ghostly  kings  and  queens 
setting  out  upon  their  unearthly  business. 


EDMUND   SPENSER  255 

It  was  only  last  summer,  when  I  read 
the  Fourth  Book  of  the  Faerie  Queene,  that 
I  found  I  had  been  imagining  over  and  over 
the  enchanted  persecution  of  Amoret. 

I  give  too,  in  a  section  which  I  call 
'Gardens  of  Dehght/  the  good  gardens  of 
Adonis  and  the  bad  gardens  of  Phsedria  and 
Acrasia,  which  are  mythological  and  sym- 
bolical, but  not  allegorical,  and  show,  more 
particularly  those  bad  islands,  his  power  of 
describing  bodily  happiness  and  bodily 
beauty  at  its  greatest.  He  seemed  always 
to  feel  through  the  eyes,  imagining  every- 
thing in  pictures.  Marlowe's  Hero  and 
Leander  is  more  energetic  in  its  sensuality, 
more  complicated  in  its  intellectual  energy 
than  this  languid  story,  which  pictures 
always  a  happiness  that  would  perish  if  the 
desire  to  which  it  offers  so  many  roses  lost 
its  indolence  and  its  softness.  There  is 
no  passion  in  the  pleasure  he  has  set  amid 
perilous  seas,  for  he  would  have  us  under- 
stand that  there  alone  could  the  war-worn 
and  the  sea-worn  man  find  dateless  leisure 
and  unrepining  peace. 

October,  1902. 


n^HE  following  pages  contain  advertisements 
of  Macmillan  books  by  the  same  author, 
and  other  poetic  works. 


New  Poems  and  Essays 

By   WILLIAM   BUTLER   YEATS 

"  Mr.  Yeats  is  probably  the  most  important  as  well  as  the 
most  widely  known  of  the  men  concerned  directly  in  the 
so-called  Celtic  renaissance.  More  than  this,  he  stands 
among  the  few  men  to  be  reckoned  with  in  modern 
poetry."  —  Ne^v  York  Herald. 

The  Green  Helmet  and  Other  Poems 

Decorated  cloth,  ismo,  $1.2^ 
The  initial  piece  in  this  volume  is  a  deliciously  conceived 
heroic  farce,  quaint  in  humor  and  sprightly  in  action. 
It  tells  of  the  difficulty  in  which  two  simple  Irish  folk 
find  themselves  when  they  enter  into  an  agreement  with 
an  apparition  of  the  sea,  who  demands  that  they  knock 
off  his  head  and  who  maintains  that  after  they  have 
done  that  he  will  knock  off  theirs.  There  is  a  real 
meaning  in  the  play  which  it  will  not  take  the  thought- 
ful reader  long  to  discover.  Besides  this  there  are  a  num- 
ber of  shorter  poems,  notably  one  in  which  Mr.  Yeats 
answers  his  critics  of  "The  Playboy  of  the  Western 
World." 


Plays 


New  edition.  Cloth,  ismo.  $2.00  net 
This  edition  of  Mr.  Yeats's  plays  has  been  thoroughly 
revised  and  contains  considerable  new  matter  in  the  way 
of  appendices.  "The  Countess  Cathleen"  and  "The 
Land  of  Heart's  Desire "  are  presented  in  new  form, 
the  versions  being  those  which  the  Irish  Players  use. 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  York 


other  Works  by  William  Butler  Yeats 

Lyrical  and  Dramatic  Poems 

IN  TWO  VOLUMES 
Vol.  I.  Lyrical  $1.75  net 

Vol.  II.  Plays  (Revised)  $2.00  net 

The  two-volume  edition  of  the  Irish  poet's  works  includes 
everything  he  has  done  in  verse  up  to  the  present  time. 
The  first  volume  contains  his  lyrics ;  the  second  includes 
all  of  his  five  dramas  in  verse  :  "  The  Countess  Cathleen," 
"The  Land  of  Heart's  Desire,"  "The  King's  Threshold," 
"  On  Baile's  Strand,"  and  "  The  Shadowy  Waters." 

William  Butler  Yeats  stands  among  the  few  men  to  be 
reckoned  with  in  modern  poetry,  especially  of  a  dramatic 
character.  The  New  York  Sun,  for  example,  refers  to  him 
as  "an  important  factor  in  English  literature,"  and  con- 
tinues :  — 

"  '  Cathleen  ni  Hoolihan  '  is  a  perfect  piece  of  artistic  worki 
poetic  and  wonderfully  dramatic  to  read,  and,  we  should 
imagine,  far  more  dramatic  in  the  acting.  Maeterlinck  has 
never  done  anything  so  true  or  effective  as  this  short  prose 
drama  of  Mr.  Yeats's.  There  is  not  a  superfluous  word  in 
the  play  and  no  word  that  does  not  tell.  It  must  be  dan- 
gerous to  represent  it  in  Ireland,  for  it  is  an  Irish  Marseil- 
laise. ...  In  'The  Hour  Glass 'a  noble  and  poetic  idea 
is  carried  out  effectively,  while  '  A  Pot  of  Broth '  is  merely  a 
dramatized  humorous  anecdote.  But  '  Cathleen  ni  Hooli- 
han '  stirs  the  blood,  and  in  itself  establishes  Mr.  Yeats's 
reputation  for  good." 

Other  Works 

The  Celtic  Twilight  i2mo,  $1.50  net 

The  Hour  Glass  and  Other  Plays  i2mo,  $1.25  net 

Ideas  of  Good  and  Evil  i2mo,  $1.50  net 

In  the  Seven  Woods  i2mo,  $1.00  net 

W.  B.  Yeats  and  Lady  Gregory 

Unicorn  from  the  Stars  and  Other  Plays    i2mo,  $1.50  net 


THE   MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  York 


Fi 


ires 

By  W.  W.  GIBSON 

Author  of  "  Daily  Bread,"  "  Womenkind,"  etc. 

Cloth,  i2tno,  $I.2J  net 

In  this  striking  book  of  verse  Mr.  Gibson  writes  of  simple, 
homely  folk  with  touching  sympathy.  The  author's  previous 
book,  "  Daily  Bread,"  was  heralded  far  and  wide  as  the 
book  of  the  year  in  the  field  of  poetry ;  in  "  Fires  "  are  con- 
tained many  of  the  same  characteristics  which  distinguished 
it.  The  story  of  a  girl  whose  lover  is  struck  dead  by  a  flying 
bit  of  stone ;  of  a  wife  who  has  unusual  patience  with  her 
husband's  shortcomings ;  of  a  flute  player;  of  a  shop  and 
a  shopkeeper;  of  a  machine  and  those  who  feed  it  —  these 
are  the  subjects  of  a  number  of  the  separate  pieces. 


BY  THE  SAME  AUTHOR 
Daily    Bread        in  Three  Books        i27no,  $1.25  net 

Womenkind  i2mo,  $1.25  net 

"  There  is  a  man  in  England  who  with  sufficient  plainness 
and  sufficient  profoundness  is  addressing  himself  to  life, 
and  daring  to  chant  his  own  times  and  social  circumstances, 
who  ought  to  become  known  to  America.  He  is  bringing 
a  message  which  might  well  rouse  his  day  and  generation  to 
an  understanding  of  and  a  sympathy  with  life's  disinherited 
—  the  overworked  masses." 

"A  Millet  in  word-painting,  who  writes  with  a  terrible 
simplicity,  is  Wilfrid  Wilson  Gibson,  born  in  Hexham, 
England,  in  1878,  of  whom  Canon  Cheyne  wrote  :  '  A  new 
poet  of  the  people  has  risen  up  among  us  —  the  story  of  a 
soul  is  written  as  plainly  in  "  Daily  Bread "  as  in  "  The 
Divine  Comedy  "  and  in  "  Paradise  Lost. 

"  Mr.  Gibson  is  a  genuine  singer  of  his  own  day,  and  turns 
into  appealing  harmony  the  world's  harshly  jarring  notes  of 
poverty  and  pain." 

—  Abridged  from  an  article  in  "  The  Outlook." 


THE   MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  York 


A  BOOK  THAT  HAS  BEEN  WAITED  FOR 

THE  MODERN  READER'S  CHAUCER 

The  Complete  Poetical  Works  of 
Geoffrey  Chaucer 

Now  first  put  into  modern  English  by 

JOHN   S.   P.   TATLOCK 

Author  of  "  The  Development  and  Chronology  of  Chaucer's  Works," 

AND 

PERCY  MacKAYE 

Author  of  "  The  Canterbury  Pilgrims,"  etc. 

With  32  full-page  illustrations  in  color  by  Warwick  Goble 

Decorated  cloth,  ^fto,  $5.00  net 

Any  one  unversed  in  old  English  is  familiar  with 
the  difficulty  of  reading  Chaucer  in  the  original  —  to 
many  it  is  not  only  a  difficulty,  but  an  impossibility. 
The  vast  literary  wealth  of  Chaucer's  writings  has 
been  therefore  up  to  this  time  beyond  the  grasp  of 
the  general  reader  —  for  there  has  been  no  complete 
rendering  in  modern  English.  It  is  to  do  away 
with  this  condition  that  "The  Modern  Reader's 
Chaucer"  has  been  prepared.  Adhering  closely  to 
the  original,  the  editors  have  rendered  in  modern 
English  all  the  wonderful  tales  of  this  early  poet. 
A  particular  feature  of  the  volume  is  the  illustra- 
tions, of  which  there  are  thirty-two  in  colors  from 
paintings  by  Warwick  Goble,  the  celebrated  Eng- 
lish artist.  From  the  standpoint  of  artistic  book 
making  it  is  to  be  doubted  if  a  handsomer  book  will 
be  published  for  some  time  to  come  or  even  one 
which  will  stand  comparison  with  this. 


THE    MACMILLAN   COMPANY 

Publishers  64-66  Fifth  Avenue  New  York 


Date  Due 


UC  SOUTHtRN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACIL 


AA    000  591484 


jr 


3  1210  00244  1952 


